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THE 

ETHICAL ASPECTS 

OF 

EVOLUTION 

BY 
JOHN C. KIMBALL 






•IN-LUCE 
VERITATIS 



BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1913 



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PREFACE 

A volume entitled " The Romance of Evolu- 
tion," and containing Mr. Kimball's essays upon 
the contact of the philosophy of evolution with 
the religious traditions and sentiments, has re- 
cently been published with a brief memorial 
preface which need not be repeated here. Mr. 
Kimball believed that evolution was the friend 
and ally of religion and not its enemy, that 
while it had overthrown an outgrown theology, 
it had opened the way for more rational and 
ethical interpretations of religion. He held 
that it had removed the foundations of reli- 
gion from the quicksands of external authority 
and of supernaturalism to the solid basis of 
reason and experience. 

The present volume contains some of Mr. 
Kimball's most characteristic lectures upon the 
relation of the doctrine of evolution to the 
ethical questions of his generation. Many of 
them were delivered before the Brooklyn Eth- 
ical Society and, in some cases, originally bore 
slightly different titles. Mr. Kimball believed 
in democracy and in human brotherhood. He 
believed in equality of privilege for every one. 



PREFACE 

He was a friend of peace, of justice, of liberty 
and of fraternity. He thought deeply and 
spoke forcibly on all such matters. 

Appended to the lectures are six sermons 
preached in the course of a long and fruitful 
ministry. The concluding sermons are those 
in which Mr. Kimball bade farewell to his con- 
gregations in Hartford, Conn., and Sharon, 
Mass. 

All who knew Mr. Kimball recognized the 
wide range of his knowledge, the freshness and 
independence of his thought, his keen sympathy 
with all who suffered injustice or wrong, his 
chiA'^alry in taking u^ the cause of the weak and 
the unbefriended, his fund of humor, his sin- 
cerity and warm-heartedness. These addresses 
and sermons declare what manner of man he 
was and set forth his matured convictions upon 
many timely and important themes. 



CONTENTS 



I 

II 
III 

IV 

V 

VI 

VII 



I 

II 
III 

IV 

V 

VI 



THE ETHICAL ASPECTS OF 
EVOLUTION 



The Ethics of Evolution 
Evolution and Animal Life 
Evolution and War 
Evolution and Politics . 
Evolution and Progress . 
Evolution and Christianity 
Immortal Youth 

SERMONS 



PAGE 
1 

52 
94 

145 
201 
224 
260 



Childhood — A Christmas Sermon . 281 

Stand-bys 297 

Liberal Christianity and Liberal 

Orthodoxy 313 

A Dedication Sermon, Omaha, 1871 338 

A Minister's Ideal 363 

The Humanitarian Side of Religion 389 



THE 

ETHICAL ASPECTS 

OF 

EVOLUTION 



THE ETHICAL ASPECTS OF 
EVOLUTION 



THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 

The subject of this book is distinctively the 
Ethics of Evolution, not the Evolution of Eth- 
ics — in other words, the kind of ethics to 
which man is logically brought by the process 
of evolution, and not the process itself by which 
the results are brought about. Nevertheless, 
as there are differences of view among evolu- 
tionists with regard to the exact nature of the 
process, and as the results reached depend for 
their certainty somewhat on the view taken of 
how they are reached, I want, as a preliminary, 
to review the process part of the matter, and 
to state what is special in my own conception 
of its nature. 

First, while accepting in general the reviseS 
utilitarian theory that ethics is the outcome 
under evolution of the accumulated experiences 
of our race with regard to what is fittest in 
conduct, consolidated into intuitions and trans- 
mitted from generation to generation by 
1 



S ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

heredity, the theory so brilliantly set forth by 
Mr. Spencer and his disciples, I cannot go with 
them in the prominence they give to pleasure 
and pain as the chief things for which these 
experiences have been useful, or in holding, as 
they state it, that " acts are good or bad ac- 
cording as their aggregate effects increase 
men's happiness or increase their misery." 

Utilitarianism is not necessarily confined to 
utility for happiness. To get at nature's 
form of it we must get at what nature wants 
things to be useful for, that is, at what nature 
in evolution is trying to bring about. What 
is it? Plainly, not pleasure alone, or pleasure 
even in the form of happiness, but growth, 
fuller and finer life, an ever better state of 
things alike in the universe at large and in 
its individual parts. As Longfellow has truly 
put it: 

*' Not enjoyment and not sorrow 

Is our destined end or way. 
But to act that each to-morrow 

Finds us farther than to-day." 

And the word utility, therefore, fairly includes 
everything which goes to promote this object. 
Pleasure is only one of these things, is a means 
and not an end, the guide and not the goal, the 
feather with which nature tips the arrow of 
conduct to send it the straighter to its mark, 
and not the mark itself. And even allowing it 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 3 

is an infallible guide, even allowing, what is un- 
doubtedly true, that all good conduct tends in 
the end to happiness, and all bad conduct to 
misery, it surely is a mistake to put the means 
of a thing in the place of its end as constituting 
its distinctive character. 

Compare conduct in this respect with the eat- 
ing and drinking of food. These acts are 
pleasant, and the pleasure of them is beyond 
question the immediate motive which prompts 
them; and normally, food is good or bad ac- 
cording as it is agreeable or disagreeable to the 
taste. But nature's object in having us eat 
and drink is not the pleasure of eating and 
drinking, but growth, health, efficiency for 
work; and her supreme test as to whether food 
and drink are good or bad is whether they build 
us up as men and women and enable us the bet- 
ter to do our work in the world. 

So with what is the food and drink of hu- 
manity's larger body. The hedonist is right in 
saying that its goodness and pleasantness must 
in the long run go together — is restating only 
the old Scripture doctrine that " wisdom's ways 
are ways of pleasantness." But its goodness 
does not consist in its pleasantness, but in its 
being morally nutritious, and so promotive of 
the doer's inner health and strength. Mr. 
Spencer himself has places in which he recog- 
nizes this to be the real criterion, as where he 



4 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

says, " Evolution becomes highest when tHe 
conduct simultaneously achieves the greatest 
totality of life in self, in offspring, and in fel- 
low men." 

There is one word in our language which ex- 
presses grandly all these ends, a word which in- 
cludes happiness, yet is beset with none of its 
objectionable implications, the word "welfare." 
And I should define good conduct as the conduct 
voluntarily adopted which has been found by 
the accumulated experiences of mankind, con- 
solidated into intuitions and transmitted by 
heredity, to be most conducive to the welfare of 
the individual and of the race, and say its right- 
ness has come from its being in harmony with 
natural laws ; and bad conduct as that which 
has been found in the same way to be conducive 
to the ill-being of the individual and of the race, 
and as getting its wrongness from its being in 
violation of natural laws. 

Briefly stated, ethics is humanity's hygiene. 

But while utility is thus the test objectively 
of all conduct as to its goodness or badness, 
whatever its source may be, it seems to me, yet 
farther, that to give any form of it subjectively 
an ethical character, its motive, purpose, cost 
of effort, ought to be made more prominent 
than they have been thus far by evolutionists. 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 5 

I cannot indeed go with those who would 
make the motive everything in determining the 
moral value of an act, for the world is full of 
cases in which the most outrageous deeds have 
had behind them motives which in themselves 
were sincerely good. It is not only hell down 
below, but some of the darkest, direst hells up 
here on earth which are paved with good in- 
tentions. It was a good intention which intro- 
duced slavery into America, kindled the fires of 
Smithfield, ordered the massacre of St. Bar- 
tholomew, beheaded Sir Henry Vane, burned 
Joan of Arc, crucified Jesus Christ, and, in- 
deed, if the Bible account is to be trusted, it 
was a good intention which at first introduced 
into the world " sin and all our woe." 

But, on the other hand, if outward utility is 
made the sole test, some of the grandest deeds 
humanity has ever risen to — liberty's ten thou- 
sand defeated battle-fields, religion's long list of 
martyrs whose blood never became the seed of 
any church, reforms which perished in dungeon 
cells, and the vast army of seekers after scien- 
tific truth who found only error or failure — 
all these will have to be set down as ethically 
bad; while at the same time not a few deeds 
whose prompting was the meanest and some- 
times the wickedest motives, but which unex- 
pectedly turned out well, as, for instance, the 
stealing of negroes from Africa, England's 



6 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

persecution of our Puritan ancestors, the slave- 
holders' rebellion, Joseph's being sold by his 
brethren into Egypt, and even the old serpent's 
tempting of Adam and Eve into sin, must be 
regarded as good conduct. Last summer a 
dog on the St. Lawrence River leaped bravely 
into the water and rescued from drowning a 
child that had fallen from the wharf. Of 
course everybody praised and petted and 
daintily fed him for the act ; and the next day, 
wanting more of such treatment, and no child 
falling in to afford him the means of meriting 
it, the hedonistically philosophic animal deliber- 
ately pushed a nice little girl overboard and 
again plunged in for her rescue, evidently very 
much puzzled at the apparent inconsistency of 
ethics, when, on bringing her ashore, instead of 
caresses he received kicks. And if outward 
acts alone are to be considered, who shall say 
the dog did not have some reason for his dis- 
appointment, the deed itself in each case being 
the same. 

Evidently, the only way of avoiding such in- 
consistency is to recognize both factors, the 
motive and the result, as contributing to render 
conduct ethical; and it is a recognition which 
has the fullest sanction of evolution. For all 
motives, whether they lead outwardly to failure 
or to success, have a reflex action inwardly on 
their subjects, which must be taken into the ac- 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 7 

count. If they are mean and bad, no matter 
how helpful to the world's welfare their out- 
come may be, they make the man hhnself mean 
and bad ; if noble and good, no matter how ut- 
ter their outward failure, they give him within 
a nobler and better soul. And this inner 
growth transmitted by heredity and consoli- 
dated into character becomes in after genera- 
tions as truly a part of the world's ethical pos- 
sessions as anything which results outwardly 
from conduct. 

Instead of its being true, therefore, that 
" some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall," the 
truth is that goodness, though often mistaken 
in its action and leading in some things to harm, 
never wholly fails ; and evil, though sometimes 
acting rightly and leading to some forms of 
benefit, never wholly succeeds. Though out of 
Spanish lust for gold came the discovery and 
exploration of this New World, all the same out 
of it came Spain's own decay. The cruelty 
which wrenched from Indian hands " the pearl 
of the Antilles " secreted in its own blood the 
acid which all these later years has been dis- 
solving it in the conqueror's very grasp. The 
valor of Naseby and Marston Moor, of York- 
town and Appomattox Court House, was the 
reflex action of liberty's ten thousand defeated 
battle-fields ; and the martyrs' blood in reli- 
gion which was never the seed of any church 



8 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

became the seed not less surely of the whole 
coming man. 

" The aim, if reached or not, makes grand the life.** 

Again, as regards the altruistic element in 
ethics, I can but think that evolutionists, in 
taking a fully developed egoism as its starting 
point, have mistaken the process of its origin, 
and thereby have made for themselves a very 
needless difficulty. We all remember Pope's fa- 
mous lines : 

" Self love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, 
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake. 
The center moved, a circle straight succeeds. 
Another still and still another spreads. 
Friend, parent, neighbor first it will embrace. 
His country next, and next the human race." 

But ontologically it is vastly more probable 
that the real order was exactly the other way, 
the wider circle coming first, or, rather, it is 
probable that evolution followed here the same 
order as everywhere else, differentiated the vari- 
ous forms of love altogether out of one original 
homogeneity of feeling in which they all existed 
only as undeveloped possibilities, just as in as- 
tronomy nature did not make the planets, the 
satellites, and the sun all complete and then 
unite them in the solar system, but started them 
as one common nebulous mist, and evolved at 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 9 

the same time the system and its members. 
The ego and the alter are thus not father and 
child, but twin brothers, — 

" Self love and social at one birth began/' — 

it being philosophically just as impossible to 
develop the one without the other as in magnet- 
ism to get a north pole without getting equally 
a south pole. In the lower forms of life the 
two are only partially differentiated even now, 
their communities having a common gregarious 
self in which the individual selves are hardly 
more distinct than are those of its cells in an 
animal body. Years ago, before I had learned 
my wider ethical relations, and so, though or- 
dained to be a fisher of men, used occasionally 
in the summer to indulge in being a fisher of 
fish, I have been in a line of boats off the 
Beverly shore half a mile long, pulling in mack- 
erel as fast as the hook could be thrown, when 
suddenly, though the water remained full of 
them, they would cease biting with me and at 
the same time with every boat in the line. Then 
after half an hour or so, just as my ministerial 
conscience was regaining its sway, and about 
to send me home to my proper vocation, my 
hook would be seized, and instantly I would 
hear the captives flapping into boats the whole 
length of the line, evidently as much the result 
of one impulse as if they had been a single fish. 



10 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

Wordsworth with his close observation of na- 
ture noticed the same trait long ago in a herd 
of cattle: 

" The cattle are grazing, their heads never raising, 
There are forty feeding as one." 

Haeckel somewhere describes a creature named 
the flimmer-ball, whose parts some of the time 
swim about as independently as a shoal of min- 
nows, but which, when frightened, unite again 
and move as one organic mass. Bees in a 
swarm are but a single body. And among hu- 
man beings the same all-embracing tribal self 
is to be seen in the sway of fashion, in all boy- 
hood's simultaneously bringing out its marbles 
with the first warm days of spring, and in the 
uniformity with which Easter bonnets appear 
as a part of Easter religion on the heads of 
all women, and summer hats disappear about 
the tenth of September, as by a common inner 
breeze, from the heads of all men. Especially 
is it seen in all panics, as at the battle of, 
Chancellorsville, when the whole Eleventh Army 
Corps, with eyes bulging and hair on end, came 
rushing back pell mell on the very bayonets of 
the corps behind them, a vast shoal of human 
beings turned into a gigantic flimmer-ball in 
which all individual selves reverted to the com- 
mon animal self out of which they had been 
evolved. 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 11 

With this homogeneity of the ego and alter 
to start with, corresponding with what in 
paleontology is called " a prophetic type," it is 
easy to see that as it differentiated into distinct 
individuals, each individual must have inherited 
and developed in itself some share of what was 
in the original common stock, regard for self 
and regard for the whole, so that the command 
of Jesus, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself," that is, as being thy larger self, is 
not a mere arbitrary precept, but an ethic of 
evolution which has behind it the foundation 
principle of all society. 

It is a process which is still going on, inte- 
gration, the third great stage of evolution, be- 
ing the phase of it which is now most in evi- 
dence ; and as in astronomy when the separating 
planets were organized into the solar system, 
the gravity which had made them originally one 
nebulous mass was not lost, but became the 
force which is now holding them organically to- 
gether and keeping them forever acting on each 
other, so by the same beautiful law, as fast as 
the units of our race are integrated in their 
social system, the regard for the common homo- 
geneous self which they had at first, becomes the 
affection which holds them in altruistic rela- 
tions, and makes each of them still interested 
in the welfare of the whole, so that as Pope 
says: 



12 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

" There's not a blessing individuals find 
But somehow leans and harkens to mankind." 

Again, as regards the origin of that mysteri- 
ous feeling in ethics which is ordinarily denoted 
by the little word " ought," or, when we want 
to talk Kant, by the big words, " categorical 
imperative," it seems to me that evolutionists, 
in trying to derive it from the inherited teach- 
ings of those in authority, from the dread of 
punishment, from the reasoning that to get 
rights ourselves we must give them to others, 
and the like, have justly exposed their efforts 
to the criticisms of unbelievers, and have failed 
to use one of the most fundamental and far- 
reaching of their own principles, the natural 
tendency of things to vary; a principle set 
forth so clearly by Mr. Darwin in his great 
work on the " Origin of Species," and one which 
exists not only in all forms of outward life, 
but in all parts of our inward being. Ought- 
ness, obligation, is indeed, as all the intuitional 
opponents of ethical evolution insist, a new spe- 
cies of feeling; but there is no reason to sup- 
pose that it did not originate, like all other 
new species of things, simply as a variation by 
minute changes from an older and more primi- 
tive species. It was probably at first the 
simple compulsion to get food and to do the 
other immediate visible things which were 
found by experience to be necessary for the 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 13 

continuance of life ; then in the course of ages, 
it varied with men into the abstract feeling of 
compulsion to do whatever the inherited experi- 
ences of the race had shown to be essential for 
its welfare, those that had the variations and 
acted upon them surviving and leaving descend- 
ants, those that had them not inevitably dy- 
ing out. Must, — that is the missing link in 
the chain between appetite and oughtness ; duty 
— that the Messiah which came to men, as 
Jesus did, that they might have life and have 
it more abundantly. A rudimentary indication 
of its humble origin still remains in the very 
words of the beatitude which is its highest ex- 
pression, "Blessed are they which do hunger 
and thirst after righteousness, for they shall 
be filled." And thus, instead of the moral 
law's being dragged down by evolution, as Mr. 
Balfour sneers, from the sublimity of the starry 
heavens to the ingenuity of the protective 
blotches on a beetle's wing, is not its real 
grandeur increased by its being made by it, 
like gravity, — rather, like Deity, a power which 
holds both the starry heavens and the humblest 
dust all in one comprehensive grasp.? 

Beyond oughtness, and as a crown to all the 
other factors concerned in ethical evolution, I 
have to recognize that of free will, not free will 
of the illusive nature that many evolutionists 



U ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

have made it, that is, freedom to will what one 
pleases, what pleases being as fixed in its ac- 
tion as what forces, nor yet free will as itself 
a cause and originator of force, — I cannot 
follow Dr. Martineau in that conception, — but 
free will as a self-determining faculty, able to 
choose which among pleasing things shall be 
its motive, and a director of causes and forces, 
— the free will which makes with heredity and 
environment the three great factors of all con- 
duct. I know well the difficulties such a free 
will involves as regards law and motive and the 
chain of cause and effect, and that the exact 
process of its origin under evolution has never 
been explained. But it is no harder to deal 
with in this respect than life, or self-conscious- 
ness, or any of man's higher spiritual facul- 
ties, — is simply one round more of a ladder, 
each of which, though taking us into a world 
which is outside of all previous science, is found 
ultimately to take us to one which is inside of 
a yet larger science. It is what we are as di- 
rectly conscious of as we are of existence itself ; 
and the recognition of its reality is the only 
thing which can save evolution from the charge 
of a fraud at the very foundation of man's 
moral nature, the only thing which can give 
ethics its supremely distinctive character over 
all other conduct, or make it otherwise than a 
very delicate kind of mechanism, the only thing 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 15 

out of which it can get honestly its feelings of 
responsibility, remorse and self-approval. So 
I say with Emerson: 

Nor pauses in his plan, 
" For he who worketh high and wise. 
Will take the sun out of the skies 
Ere freedom out of man." 

Passing now from these special points in 
the process of ethical evolution, to the results 
of the process, the first thing to be noticed is 
that ethical evolution does not exclude those 
results which have been arrived at by other sys- 
tems, but includes alike them and their explana- 
tions, — differing in this respect from all other 
systems. The others are like the medical stu- 
dent at an emergency hospital where a good deal 
of rivalry existed to see which of the young 
men, when a call came to them for the ambu- 
lance, would get to the injured man first and 
bring him in. Having a very slow horse, this 
student was for a long while the last at the ac- 
cident, and returning so often empty-wagoned, 
he was a good deal jeered at by his comrades 
for his ill success. By and by a change oc- 
curred by which he got a fresh young horse, and 
the very next day came in ahead of all the rest 
with four wounded men. The question at once 
arose of how he had done it. " Oh," said he, 
gleefully, " I drove full speed with my new 



16 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

horse to the one knocked-down man I was called 
to, and in galloping back I knocked down my- 
self three more men and brought them along 
also." That is exactly what ethics hitherto 
has done, — in getting to its operating room 
any one of the world's four great systems, the 
theological, the legal, the intuitional and the 
utilitarian, it has had to knock down each of 
the other three and has brought in their shat- 
tered remains also. 

Ethical evolution on the other hand is like 
the well-known Irish soldier with the group 
of prisoners he one day captured and brought 
into camp. Instead of knocking down either 
theology, law, utility or intuitionalism, it has 
captured them all without a bruise or a blow, as. 
he did, by simply " surrounding them." 

It is this which is the distinguishing mark of 
all great truths, their reconciling and including 
on a higher plane what lower down were only 
antagonistic half truths ; and I know of noth- 
ing in the history of human thought which has 
done this so completely and beautifully, and 
with such a wealth of far-reaching suggestions 
as Herbert Spencer's " Data of Ethics." Some- 
body has called it his weakest book. But to my 
mind it is his strongest and most original, not 
excepting even his " Psychology," — the Colum- 
bus discovery of a new continent on the globe 
of truth. Its hedonism is only the mistake of 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 17 

supposing its new world to be the old Indias, 
not affecting seriously its real grandeur. And, 
if he had written nothing else, this alone would 
have made him what I believe the future will 
write him, the leading mind of the nineteenth 
century. 

Equally, evolution includes and justifies the 
various practical ethics of all nations, races and 
ages. Take the great central ones now held 
by all civilized people as the highest to which 
the human mind has come, — temperance, 
chastity, honesty, veracity, benevolence, self- 
sacrifice, good citizenship, reverence and the 
like, — evolution does not with its moving into 
its ethical house propose to store them all 
away, like old furniture, into the garret of the 
past, and put brand new ones in their place, 
any more than the nebular hypothesis proposes 
to change the stars, or geology to re-make the 
strata of the earth. It recognizes that like 
the stars and the earth they may in the course 
of ages be modified and have new relations, but 
it will be with no shock, no interregnum of vir- 
tue and duty. All evolution is in its very na- 
ture conservative. It points out how every- 
thing which is has a tap-root reaching down the 
eons into the world's primal dust, — shows how 
its future will have to come, not by any fiat 
of religion, or science, or legislation, but as 



18 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

the slow outgrowth of the present and the past. 
And, pre-eminently, it does so with regard to 
our age's great central virtues and duties, — 
traces them from their far-off beginnings, 
shows that though often poorly kept, they have 
survived, according to its own principles, only 
because in their struggle for existence they 
have been found the fittest for men to live by, 
and emphasizes that by its own definition of 
ethics as that conduct which is most conducive 
to human welfare, they are the ethics of evo- 
lution. 

Look at the history of one of them which 
many persons have thought to be the most in- 
capable of originating and flourishing and be- 
ing sanctioned under the doctrine of utility, 
that of self-sacrifice. How, it is asked, can a 
kind of conduct which consists in the individ- 
ual's giving up his own life, and a nation's giv- 
ing up the lives of its noblest and best citizens, 
be conducive, in this world at any rate, to either 
individual or social welfare.? 

Well, to get at its root we must go back far 
beyond humanity into that homogeneousness of 
tribal life and care, out of which egoism and 
altruism have alike come. When a flock of 
grasshoppers out on the prairie meets a line 
of burning grass, its foremost ranks do not 
turn back, as a single grasshopper would, but 
unhesitatingly plunge in, and the rest do the 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 19 

same, and so on, each perishing till the fire is 
extinguished and a bridge formed over which 
the main body, or, perhaps, as the only ones 
left, the rear ranks, pass on. It looks at first 
like a magnificent example of self-sacrifice 
away down in the lower parts of the animal 
kingdom, something which could not originate 
in any evolutionized love of life, or in anything 
but a Heaven-implanted altruism. But really 
the swarm is only one large, loosely- jointed 
body, a part of which dies to save the other 
part, and is precisely what every individual 
animal does with the cells of which it is made 
up when it wants to rush through fire, is pre- 
cisely what the most selfish person does when 
about to fall, — flings out his hands to get 
bruised rather than have his whole body harmed, 
— is done from the love of their common life. 
And when this common life with its common 
love develops, as it does in man, into individual 
lives with their individual wills and selves, how 
natural it is that the instinctive impulse to 
their common preservation, sacrificing a part 
to save the whole, should develop with them into 
that grand voluntary altruism which can sing 
that 

" Whether on the scaffold high. 
Or in the battle's van 
The noblest place for man to die 
Is where he dies for man." 



20 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

How inevitable is it also, that those tribes of 
animals and those nations of men which have 
the most of such individuals ready to sacrifice 
themselves in battle and in danger for the com- 
mon good, should survive, while those which 
have them not, or have the fewest of them, must 
inevitably in the struggle for existence be 
overwhelmed and perish, the evolutionary ful- 
filment of Jesus' words, " He that findeth his 
life, shall lose it," — lose it in the dying out of 
his tribe ; " and he that loseth his life for my 
sake shall find it again," — find it in the larger 
life of his nation and his race. And who shall 
say that the fagots around the martyr's stake 
are any the less ethical because they are thus 
only at the upper end of a long line of fires 
at whose other extreme a flock of grasshoppers 
died ; or that the cross on which Jesus hung, 
" towering o'er the wrecks of time," loses any 
of its moral grandeur because its foot rests 
in the ashes of earth's unnumbered animal 
myriads that gave their little undivided shares 
of life in order that the world's great whole 
might live; or that Mr. Kidd is not most pro- 
foundly mistaken when he declares in his " So- 
cisi Evolution," that there is nothing in nature 
which can prompt a man to sacrifice his present 
good for the good of posterity, and that we 
must go to a heavenly religion to get what is 
thus rooted at the beginning in every phase of 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 21 

earthly life and without which no earthly life 
could ever be? 

But, while the ethics of evolution thus in- 
cludes the highest existing ethics and those of 
the highest races, it includes, also, just as cer- 
tainly, those of the lowest character, alike in 
the present and the past, and of the lowest 
races, even the most savage and uncivilized 
ones. And how is it possible for any set of 
things grouped under the same name to be more 
utterly different from each other than many of 
these are? Look at a few specimens. The 
Ashantee girl who, when she wants to be very 
dressy, ties a twig to her back hair, — puts on 
this and nothing more, — is morally shocked at 
the English girl who is so ashamed of her nat- 
ural charms that she covers them up with yards 
of cloth. A man with only one wife is despised 
for his selfishness by the Mokololo women ex- 
actly as an old bachelor without any wife is by 
all self-respecting Christian women. Filial 
duty among the Fijians is performed by a son's 
tenderly burying his old mother alive. 
Honesty is practised among the tribes of the 
Philippine Islands by their keeping a careful 
debit and credit account of each other's cut- 
off heads — tribes that some of our statesmen 
to-day are anxious to make our fellow American 
citizens. A Mayoruma man's great objection 



^2 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

to becoming a Christian was that if killed in 
battle he was liable to be buried and eaten up 
by worms, instead of being broiled and con- 
sumed by human beings. An Asiatic chief in 
his last sickness, being urged by a missionary 
to forgive his enemies as a preparation for 
dying, answered with the most self-righteous 
complacency that he hadn't any, — he had al- 
ready killed them all. And generally the graces 
and good deeds by which a savage expects to be 
saved are the number of lives he has taken, the 
extent to which he has hated his foes, the 
amount of property he has stolen, and the suc- 
cess with which he has lied. 

It is a difference which no other ethical sys- 
tem has been able to explain, except as the work 
of an evil spirit or of man's inherent depravity, 
but which under evolution becomes perfectly 
explicable as the prompting of his inherent 
goodness, each form of it being the kind of 
ethics which the people producing it have found 
to be in their circumstances and for their stage 
of development most conducive to their preser- 
vation and welfare. 

Look at one of its apparently worst manifes- 
tations, that of children's putting their par- 
ents to death as soon as they arrive at old age, 
so different from the civilized one of caring for 
them then as the most delightful of duties. It 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 23 

has been explained as the prompting of a re- 
ligious belief that as people die, mature and 
strong, or old and weak, so in the future they 
will always be. But its origin is really ethical. 
Among tribes liable at any moment to be at- 
tacked by foes, and always living on the nar- 
rowest margin of food, the old are a burden 
whose keeping or removal makes all the differ- 
ence between extinction or survival. Those 
tribes which kept them alive were starved and 
defeated ; those which killed them became strong 
and victorious. The killing proved to be the 
conduct most conducive to the common welfare ; 
and just as the Russian mother in her sleigh 
pursued by wolves, flung to them a part of her 
children to save the rest, so these poor sav- 
ages, pursued by the wolves of famine and war, 
threw over from their life-carriage those who 
had come to their second childhood, rather than 
see their whole tribe perish. Friends, let us 
thank God we are living in a social state where 
such things are no longer needed ; but let us not 
talk of total depravity, and of no ethics at all 
among those, — our own ancestors probably 
doing the same thing, — who by such acts have 
brought us safely through the wilds of time 
to our civilized home. Their deeds are but 
side blossoms on that one great tree of sacri- 
fice, flowering with so many yellow and crimson 



24 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

petals, on whose topmost bough is the blossom 
that all Christendom honors to-day as ethics' 
highest reach. 

It is this necessary relativity of conduct to a 
people's social condition which explains the deg- 
radation of their life which civilization so often 
carries to the barbarous races. Because the 
higher ethics are good for Christian lands, it 
does not follow that they are necessarily good 
for some far-off isle of the sea just emerging 
from savagery, or from some nearer new state 
out West like prize-ring Nevada, just sinking 
back into brutality. The story is told of an 
old farmer who, having a two-year-old colt he 
wished to train not to shy at every unex- 
pected sight and sound, mounted him one morn- 
ing and ordered his young son to hide behind 
the fence at the end of the lane and " boo " at 
him as he came along. Down the lane they 
went, the animal with his ears erect and his 
head alert, ready with the first appearance of a 
foe to take the alarm; and at the appointed 
place out rushed the boy flinging up his hat and 
at the top of his voice shouting " Boo-oo ! " In- 
stantly up in the air went the colt's heels and 
flat on the ground went his rider's body. " You 
young rascal, you ! " exclaimed the irate old 
man, picking himself up and shaking his fist at 
the boy, " what did you frighten that horse 
for? " " Why, father," replied the young hope- 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION S5 

ful, " you told me to run out and say ' boo.' " 
*' Well," answered the sire, cooling down, but 
still somewhat severely, " it was altogether too 
big a boo for such a small horse." So with the 
exalted Christian morality that our young mis- 
sionaries have shouted to the world's old heathen 
tribes mounted on their half -tamed social state, 
it has been " altogether too big a boo for such 
a small horse," and the result has been, as in 
the Sandwich Islands, their prostration physi- 
cally and morally to the earth. 

On the other hand, we have in our modern 
civilization not a few ethical principles and 
ethical practices which are the outcome of evolu- 
tion and entirely appropriate to a savage and 
half-civilized state, but whose requisite environ- 
ment the world has outgrown, and that are as 
harmful and incongruous now as those of civili- 
zation are to savagery. Just as in the human 
body there are rudimentary organs like the 
coecal sac of the intestines, the thyroid gland 
of the throat, the muscles of the scalp, the fron- 
tal sinus of the brain, and the air passages be- 
tween the mouth and the ear, which are the 
shriveled and often harmful remnants of de- 
vices that were large and valuable in the animals 
from which the human body came, so in human- 
ity's social body we have the same phenomena, 
ethics which in our animal and savage ancestry 
were all right, but which in its civilized state 



26 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

have only the place and are doing only the mis- 
chief of rudimentary organs. A while ago one 
of the dime museums over in Boston had on 
exhibition an orang-outang named Joe, that his 
captors had dressed up in gentlemen's clothes, 
and taught to eat with a knife and fork, drink 
out of a glass, hold receptions, and even write 
on a card. But his anatomy and brain and all 
his own natural actions were those still of a 
wild man of the woods. Well, what are the ethics 
of our newspapers, our congresses, our pugil- 
istic encounters, our tariff laws and our Brad- 
ley-Martin balls but moral Joe Outangs — 
practices evolved in the woods and well enough 
there, but whicli are now only dressed up in 
civilized clothes, taught the outside rules of 
etiquette, and enabled to hold receptions, wield 
a pen, write articles and sometimes sermons, 
and that are fit only to be shown in dime mu- 
seums ? 

Nor is the contrast that of ludicrousness 
alone. All savages in the midst of their fe- 
rocity have some regard for children as condu- 
cive to the tribal welfare; and one day out in 
Borneo, a Dyak warrior was seen running 
through a captured village, holding tenderly 
under one arm a little infant, and grasping 
under the other the gory head of its slain father. 
We are horrified at the thought of such an act 
in a savage; but what is all our civilization as 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 27 

yet but the mingling of the ethics which on the 
one side holds orphan children in its asylum 
arms, and on the other builds battleships and 
raises vast armies with which to grasp in war 
the gory heads by the hundred thousand of the 
children's slain fathers — what all our Jingo 
statesmen but would be Dyak savages? 

It is this which is the real ethical character 
of all modern war, a mixing up of methods and 
virtues which were once vital elements in the 
world's great struggle for existence, but which 
it has now largely outgrown, with the finer and 
often directly antagonistic ones that are the 
special feature of our own later time. 

The fact is, war is a rudimentary organ in 
the body of our modern civilization, — our 
thirty-feet-thirteen-inch cannon, with all their 
hugeness, but the vermiform appendix to the 
ethics of evolution ; and however useful such an 
organ may have been in digesting the crude 
moral food of our wilder state, it is not strange 
that its presence now should result in cases of 
national appendicitis. 

With the rudimentary ethics of the past, now 
antiquated and dying out, evolution has also 
what may be called its embryonic, or growing 
ethics, which, though the very opposite of the 
other in its own youth, is nevertheless equally 
the product of a by-gone age. It is a well known 



£8 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

fact of biology that each animal, including even 
man, has in its growth to pass through all the 
ancestral forms from the amoeba up, out of 
which its race has been evolved. A similar 
thing takes place in a man's moral growth, his 
passing through all the various forms of it 
from that of the savage up, which society has 
ever known, only here it occurs after his physi- 
cal birth. It is thus that we have infant ethics, 
schoolboy ethics, football ethics, politician 
ethics, sportsman ethics and courtship ethics, 
all mixed in with our civilized Christian ethics, 
and gradually leading up out of themselves into 
its higher form. 

Many a poor mother does not understand the 
necessity of these lower stages, and so when she 
sees her darling boy begin his moral life by tell- 
ing lies, killing cats, swearing oaths, stealing 
tarts, fighting other boys, domineering over 
his little sister, and similar undeveloped ethical 
performances, she is in despair, fears the gal- 
lows is the only moral agency which will ever 
lift him up, and wonders how civilized people 
like herself and his father could ever have given 
birth to such a savage, — has his actions pointed 
to, perhaps, by her minister as evidences of his 
inborn total depravity. 

Let her not be alarmed. They are only the 
inevitable rounds of the moral ladder he is 
climbing over into his ethical manhood. Give 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 29 

him plenty of good bread and butter and play 
and parental love, and a modicum of minister 
and Sunday-school, and unless he is a case of 
arrested development, some of which, alas, the 
highest evolution does now and then show, she 
will see him rise out of all which is thus embry- 
onic into an adult ethics which is all that even 
a mother's prayers have ever asked for. 

Then, as accounting for another part of the 
mixed morality which under evolution we find 
in the world, is the necessity nature is under, 
when she wants to make some very great im- 
provement in society, — change it, say, from a 
military to an industrial state, or from savagery 
into civilization, — the necessity of tearing up 
and rendering useless much of what was once 
her very precious work. If anybody thinks 
evolution is all plain sailing, either physically 
or morally, — thinks that nature never has any 
perplexities and hard problems to solve and to 
hesitate over, he is woefully mistaken. Some 
of us passing through Boston a few years ago, 
while its great subway was being built, had an 
opportunity to notice the awful havoc that had 
to be made with the city's past conveniences, 
and the awful condition of the old streets which 
resulted, — indeed the Hub people are not yet 
over feeling sore at what they suifered during 
the insertion of this new spoke in their wheel. 



so ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

But no engineer tunneling a subway through 
Boston ever came across so many sacred grave- 
yards, networks of gas pipe and water pipe, in- 
volving now and then a terrible explosion, 
foundations of old churches, concealed cess- 
pools and venerable Sam Adams monuments, 
which he had to cut through and push aside, as 
evolution does every time it opens a way into 
any new part of its domains. 

See how it has been in securing man's physi- 
cal rectitude. The animal body from which 
the human one was derived, going as it did on 
all fours, had the valves of its veins, the liga- 
ments which support its embryo young, and the 
lenses and muscles of its eyes, all admirably ad- 
justed to its horizontal position. But when 
nature wanted to set the animal upright and 
make a man's body out of it, all these arrange- 
ments contrived and fixed with such ages of 
care became wrong in their position, and no 
longer of any use, the valves in the horizontal 
veins where they are not needed instead of in 
the perpendicular one where they are needed, 
the ligaments at the side of their burden instead 
of under it, and the optic lenses and muscles 
usable only by a strain out of their natural 
position, so that not a few of the weaknesses, 
sicknesses and imperfections of the human body, 
including its spectacle-wearing, have arisen in- 
evitably from its being set physically upright. 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 31 

So when nature set man morally upright, it 
involved a similar undoing of his old ethics : the 
checks and supports provided for his animal 
estate became useless, his appetites and instincts 
tending one way, his aspirations and intuitions 
another, while to see duty clearly, he had to 
get artificial helps. And now, every time a 
great reform is introduced into society, that is, 
the giving of it more uprightness, it involves 
inevitably a disturbance of the old safeguards, 
a breaking up of the old associations, and the 
making of it for awhile an ethical, subway- 
building Boston. 

Coming in part under this same head is the 
confusion of duties which arises in a transition 
state from the necessity not of suppressing all 
at once a lower set of principles to make way 
for a higher set, but of keeping for awhile both 
of them in active operation. Nature in evolu- 
tion does not bring one stage of progress 
sharply to an end before beginning another, 
but splices them together by letting the old run 
taperingly on side by side with the enlarging 
new, till the new is strong enough in itself and 
in its environment to act alone. While the 
ethics of the world's past, and especially of its 
animal past, has been the survival of the fittest 
and the killing of the unfit, that is of those who 
relatively were weak and poor and unadapted 
to their surroundings, the coming human ethics 



52 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

is the preservation of the unfit by the fittest, the 
ethics that is especially the teaching of Chris- 
tianity. But to carry out the higher principle 
all at once would crowd the world with invalids, 
idiots, criminals, tramps and barbarians, and 
would undo all that nature for ages at such an 
enormous cost has been trying to do. So for 
the present we are acting and are obliged to act 
in part under each of these two ethical systems, 
our churches and charitable societies and a few 
advanced individuals doing all they can to save 
the weak and poor, and our governments and 
business institutions and society at large all 
they can to crowd them, if not out of existence, 
yet down to an ever lower place ; and it is from 
the need of using both of what are such op- 
posite principles that arise not a few of the 
great problems of our modern civilization, — 
our Indian question, our country's Philippine 
policy, the morality of England's South African 
War, the imposing of tariffs, how to deal with 
trusts, and, towering above all else, the world's 
Chinese problem. 

Yet, while evolution thus sanctions the use 
of both principles, the proportion in which they 
shall be used is left to statesmanship and to 
humanity as their grand opportunity, and its 
lesson for them is that stress ought to be laid 
ever more and more on the side of the weak and 
the poor and physically unfit, those alike among 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 33 

individuals, nations and races, — ought to be in 
the direction of their survival and of their de- 
velopment each after its own type. By a beau- 
tiful law of nature their care lifts the fit up into 
a higher kind of fitness, that which can be 
reached in no other way ; and in the world at 
large, while it will prevent its exclusive posses- 
sion by the highest race of the highest religion, 
highest government, highest civilization, it will 
result in a fitness which is vastly better than that 
of the best alone, — in a variety of race, reli- 
gion, government and civilization where, as in 
the human body, the humblest organs will have 
their special place and work and will unite with 
the highest in producing a richer life and com- 
pleter form than the highest could without 
their help. 

Periodicity, or what Mr. Spencer calls 
rhythm, is another element which has to be con- 
sidered in accounting for the ethics of evolu- 
tion. Nothing in nature moves forward, or 
by the very constitution of nature can move 
forward, with even pace. There is first an ad- 
vance; then a rest, or perhaps retreat; then an 
advance again a little further; then another 
rest or retreat and advance, and so on, like the 
coming and going of the waves on the sea-shore 
in what as a whole is a rising tide. Some of 
these periods, as with the waves of light, are 



34 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

only the millionth part of a second apart ; some, 
as with religion and business prosperity, stretch 
over twenty or thirty years ; and some, as with 
the evolution of the different forms of life on 
the earth, are eons in length. 

The development of ethics follows this same 
law of rhythm. Just now the world is in the 
midst of a retreating wave, is losing apparently 
much of what we hoped it had permanently 
gained. Wars are raging far and wide over 
the earth. Nations which took part in its 
great Peace Congress are among the first to 
rush to arms. The world's foremost republic 
is lapsing into imperialism. The grand prin- 
ciples of liberty, self-government and equality 
of rights, set forth in our Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, after a hundred years of reverence 
are being laughed to scorn. Even the teach- 
ings of the Sermon on the Mount are denied, 
that, too, by some of its own preachers. The 
class distinctions of birth have given place to 
the class distinctions of wealth. The question 
with regard to the half civilized nations of the 
earth is which of the civilized ones in dividing 
them up shall get the largest slice of their ter- 
ritory. And everywhere the ape and tiger in 
man, which seemed to be dying out, have sprung 
up again into new life. 

It is a going back which apparently justifies 
pessimism and is filling many good people with 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 85 

despair, — is something which here and there is 
even ascribed to evolution as its cause. Evolu- 
tion is its cause, not the doctrine of evolution, 
however, but evolution itself. It is one of its 
great laws of progress, is a retreat which is 
the necessary preparation for another advance, 
is a going backward of the jumper only that he 
may leap a higher fence and reach a farther 
mark. Geology has had its times, one of them 
especially at the close of what is called the 
Permian Era, when the whole physical world ap- 
peared to have reached its climax, and all its 
life alike animal and vegetable to be either dy- 
ing out or sinking to a lower type ; and the 
finite observer looking then over its condition, 
would equally have despaired of its future. 
But, as the geologist can now see, it was only 
one of the stages preceding its great human 
era, was a sinking and dying, out of which have 
come the rising and living of the better and 
fairer world which is ours to-day. So with this 
Permian moral era. Peace will spring with new 
beauty from the fields which are being fertilized 
with war. America will return with fresh 
loyalty to its Declaration of Independence, the 
pulpit with revived ardor to preaching the 
Sermon on the Mount. The jingo politician 
will be assigned to his true place as an ethic 
fossil. And the door of the East, which cannon 
can only smash, will be found to open wide to 



36 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

the touch of him who said of old, " I stand at 
the door and knock." 

Then, beyond this, there is under evolution 
a relativity even of the highest virtues to each 
other and to their environment which makes 
them vary with circumstances as to the impera- 
tiA^eness of their use. As Mr. Spencer has well 
said, " Absolute ethics are possible only in an 
absolutely perfect social state." Some of 
them, to be sure, as those of honesty, veracity, 
justice, fidelity, kindness, self-sacrifice and the 
like, have been shown by such ages of human 
experience to be safest for man's welfare as to 
have in them for all ordinary cases the force of 
intrinsic rightness, and he must be a very bold 
man who would dare depart from their dictates. 

But the world has found that all rules, even 
moral rules, have their exceptions, and that all 
stars, even the starry virtues, differ from one 
another in the degrees of their brightness. 
Situations arise now and then in which it is im- 
possible to be faithful to the one without being 
false to the other. There are conflicts of 
ethical as well as legislative laws ; kings in the 
realms of duty as well as of state between whose 
claims occasionally we have to choose. And 
much as we may condemn the principle in its 
Jesuistic shape of doing evil that good may 
come, we have out of our very love of right to 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 37 

say that when two evils are presented as alter- 
natives, duty prompts, evil though it be, the do- 
ing of the least. Veracity is one of the man- 
liest of virtues, lying one of the meanest vices ; 
yet, if the cherry-tree cut down is that of a pa- 
triot army's movements, and the issue between a 
truth and an untruth that of a country's lib- 
erty, where is the George Washington fit to be 
its leader who will not say, " I did not do it with 
my little hatchet." When Booth was trying to 
escape after the murder of Lincoln, was it right 
to givfe him food and shelter, that food and 
shelter which in any ordinary case it would have 
been a sin to have refused .^^ Who to save his 
wife and children from outrage does not feel 
that he ought to deceive and maim, and if need 
be, kill their assailant? What are all wars, de- 
fensive as well as offensive, but a legalized 
cheating, wounding, pilfering and destroying 
of the foe, a direct violation right through 
from opening shot to closing shout, of reli- 
gion's Golden Rule.? And, indeed, what is self- 
sacrifice itself, the highest virtue, but a deliber- 
ate choice between two wrongs, the wrong of 
allowing one's own life to be destroyed, which, 
if a man can prevent it, is suicide, or the wrong 
of seeing one's country, or cause, or fellow 
creatures, destroyed, which, if he can prevent it, 
is murder .f' 

These are not questions merely of scholastic 



38 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

casuistry, but of actual life, specimens of what 
every man, consciously or unconsciously, has 
daily to meet; and the difficulties they involve 
are not peculiar to the ethics of evolution, but 
are what all ethics have to deal with. There 
is no system which can make right in spite of 
its etymology, otherwise than sometimes a very 
crooked line; none which can have its higher 
without having also its lower law; none which 
on a revolving earth can make its moral, any 
more than its mathematical perpendicular, al- 
ways lie in the same direction as regards abso- 
lute space. 

The advantage of evolution over other sys- 
tems is that it provides at its very core a prin- 
ciple for dealing consistently with such diffi- 
culties, and that is the principle which makes 
the question, which of them is conducive to the 
highest welfare, the supreme test of their right- 
ness. It is no Greek grammar which after giv- 
ing a rule has to give it a long list of excep- 
tions more difficult to learn than the rule it- 
self; no martinet soldier to enforce routines 
without regard to results ; no ship's captain 
with the motto, " Obey orders, even if you 
break owners." It makes every man a part 
owner in the world's great ship, puts the port 
of a common well-being before him and says. 
While you use compass and stars and chart and 
all the experiences of the past as your help, use 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 39 

also your own brains, use also that force of evo- 
lution which is working in you not less than in 
all the past, and subordinate everything else, 
subordinate even compass and chart, if need be, 
to the one grand duty of reaching the port, — 
would say, were the alternative presented. Let 
the heavens stay up even though justice fall. 
And what is this after all, wicked as it may 
sound in the phrases of evolution, but the great 
Christian doctrine, so precious to us in its 
Scripture words, that love is the fulfilling of 
the law, that each man is to judge for himself 
what is right, and that it is the spirit in which 
a thing is done, not obedience to its letter, 
which giveth life? 

In thus making duties relative to each other 
and dependent on their environment for their 
imperativeness, the ethics of evolution is of ne- 
cessity intensely practical. It would not in- 
deed go to the extent of the Honduras woman 
Mr. Spencer speaks of, who refused to kill a 
hen for her sick husband, because, as she said, 
" her husband might die and then she would 
lose him and the hen, too " — would not refuse 
to follow blindly sometimes a generous im- 
pulse. But on the whole, it does not believe 
much in pursuing virtue for its own sake, " in 
scorn of consequence," especially when it is 
others who are involved in the consequence. 



40 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

Before it can say whether a thing is good, it 
wants to know what it is good for. Art, 
poetry, music, religion, beauty in all its forms 
are not despised by it, for it recognizes that 
they are all possible ministers to the world's 
well-being, but when they palpably fail of such 
use and are only corrupting and degrading, it 
has no toleration for the reverence of art, " for 
art's sake," or of " beauty as its own excuse 
for being," but joins with the most rigid icono- 
clast in its readiness to stamp them out. De- 
fonnity^ poverty, pain, discord, ugliness in all 
its forms, likewise, are looked upon by it 
leniently as transition states and as possible 
means of discipline to man's higher nature, but 
never as objects to be sought after for what 
they are in themselves. Miss Frances Power 
Cobbe, while visiting a hospital of incurables 
in Rome, filled with wretches who had so little 
in the way of food that they fairly screamed 
to her for bread, asked an attendant, " Are 
there no charitable people in Rome to come and 
see them.''" "Oh, yes," the sister replied, 
" there are the Princess So-and-so, and the 
Countess Blank-and-blank, saintly ladies, who 
come once a week." " And don't they provide 
them with food.^ " " No, signora, they don't 
do such things as that for them." " Then in 
Heaven's name what do they do ? " " Oh, they 
comb their hair," hair filled with filth and 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 41 

vermin ; and these great ladies took upon them- 
selves the task not to relieve the sufferers, but 
as a work of the greater merit in saving their 
own souls because of its disgustingness. Evo- 
lutionary ethics has no place for such merits. 
It is ver}' suspicious of any salvation which is 
to be realized away off in some other world. It 
believes in direct, outward salvation as the first 
thing to be sought, the salvation of the suffer- 
ers rather than of the saviors. Its method is 
to get rid of poverty and pain and ugliness, 
not to idealize them ; to feed the hungry and 
clothe the naked and clean the filthy, not to 
comb their hair. It is no anchorite, but a 
strong, well-fed, well-clothed, business-like man, 
most glad when it can do both things at once, 
make a dollar for the world and make a dollar 
for itself. And while in case of need it is ready 
to sacrifice everything it has, even life itself, 
for the common good, it believes that when the 
same thing can be accomplished without self- 
sacrifice, to do it without is the greater virtue 
and ought to be chosen. 

Again, if evolution takes off something from 
the rigid peaks of virtue, it adds vastly more 
to its breadth and depth. Every act which 
bears on welfare, and not what are called the 
intrinsic duties alone, is endowed by it with 
moral significance, the digging of a sewer more 



42 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

so at times than the preaching of a sermon, 
going to a political meeting than going to a 
church, — our eating and drinking, as Paul 
says, can be done to the glory of God. 
And it includes logically our conduct to ani- 
mals as well as to all classes of men, for it rec- 
ognizes them all as the unfolding of one life- 
principle, and all as having their well-being as 
a means and part of the world's well-being. 
Indeed, there is nothing in the universe so triv- 
ial and minute that under such ethics its bet- 
tering may not become a duty. Hitherto, as 
you know, the germ theory of disease has been 
that human ills are caused by too active mi- 
crobes, and that the way to cure men was to 
kill microbes ; but now, with more recent dis- 
coveries, it begins to look as if the cause of 
diseases is further back, — that it is only sick 
microbes which make sick men, and that to cure 
the men we need first to cure the microbes. So 
with humanity's larger moral body, to make 
sure of curing all its sicknesses, we must make 
healthy all its atoms. 

*' From nature's chain whatever link you strike. 
Tenth or ten- thousandth, breaks the chain alike/' 

and to have virtue wholly divine, it will have to 
be like the Deity himself 

" As perfect in a hair as in a heart." 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 43 

Moreover, with all the flexibility of its ap- 
plication and all the indistinctness of its out- 
lines, the ethics of evolution is very far from 
being, as so many even scholars have feared, 
without its solid foundation of everlasting prin- 
ciples. The two things are not by any means 
inconsistent with each other. Everybody 
knows how it is with the outward rules of hy- 
giene, — that what is one man's meat is 
proverbially another man's poison, that cloth- 
ing worn with comfort in summer would to the 
same individual be fatal in winter, and that the 
out-of-door, all-weather exercise which makes 
the strong man stronger, takes away from the 
poor invalid what little strength he has. Yet 
who denies from such facts that there are great 
fundamental hygienic principles, imbedded in 
our very nature, which, if we are going to live 
at all, we have got to live by? 

It is the same with moral health. Intuitional 
ethics says its rules exist in the nature of things 
and are to be acted upon without regard to ex- 
pediency by all people in all weathers. Evolu- 
tionary ethics avoids the expression " nature 
of things " because in it nature does not mean 
real nature, or things actual things ; but it says 
instead that its laws exist in the constitution of 
the universe, must have been there from the 
very start, at least in the germ, otherwise how 
could they ever have been evolved; are the laws 



44 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

of human conduct which are in harmony with 
the laws of the world's conduct; and that in 
being flexible to reason and common sense they 
are only on a par with all other natural laws. 
" Suaviter in modo, for^titer in r^,*' is its 
motto ; 

" All the forms are fugitive, 
All the substances survive/' 

is its song. And when it suspends any law, it 
is, as when those of gravity yield to those of 
chemistry and those of chemistry to those of 
vitality, not to make any interregnum of 
morals, but only to have a mightier law take 
its place, only because it would not have the 
letter which killeth supreme over the spirit 
which giveth life. 

Who shall say that such freedom of choice 
among principles makes them any the less fun- 
damental ? Can there be anything in the meta- 
physician's outside-of-the-world nature-of- 
things more safe and solid on which to base 
conduct than this inside constitution of the uni- 
verse? And if the evolutionist is accused of 
having only the changing winds of expediency 
to live by, can he not truthfully answer, — 

" The winds that o'er my ocean run, 
Reach thro' all heavens beyond the sun; 
Thro' life, thro' death, thro' fate, thro' time. 
Grand breaths of God they sweep sublime." 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 45 

Equally fixed and certain under evolution are 
the rewards and punishments of conduct. In- 
stead of being arbitrary, loose and dependent 
for their enforcement on an external divine 
will, its very definition of good conduct as that 
which tends to promote welfare, and bad con- 
duct as that which tends to promote harm, puts 
it under its own laws and makes it its own ex- 
ecutor. It agrees with the Bible that " as 
righteousness tendeth to life, so he that pur- 
sueth evil, pursueth it to his own death " ; that 
" whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap," natural good from natural seeds, spirit- 
ual fruit from spiritual sowing; and that 
though justice sometimes is long delayed, yet 
" sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death," 
and well-doing, in due time, that is, when it has 
had time to ripen, its harvest of good. 

" It knows the seed lies safe below 
The fires which blast and burn^ 
And that for all in tears we sow^ 
There waits a glad return," 

It has before it, just as truly as religion has, 
a kingdom of heaven, a kingdom whose begin- 
ning, at least, is to be on earth. The striving, 
self-sacrifice and even the sense of oughtness 
which it now has, are from their very nature 
not to last forever, not, at any rate, as the ne- 
cessities of any one of its fields. What is 



46 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

striven for is to be attained. Private and pub- 
lic welfare are to be so adjusted to each other 
that self-seeking will do the work of self-sacri- 
fice, egoism of altruism, — 

" All true self love and social be the same." 

And with each repetition of a duty, tending, as 
we know it now does, to make its performance 
easier, how can it be otherwise than that the 
most difficult ones shall at last become habits, 
like the beating of the heart and the breathing 
of the lungs, carried on without effort and 
without consciousness, a realization, so far at 
least as they are concerned, of the old Buddhist 
Nirvana, and of what in Christianity is called 
" that peace of God which passeth understand- 
ing and which the world can neither give nor 
take away." 

Yet with all this, and all its utilitarianism, 
practicality and rootedness in the earth, the 
ethics of evolution is not without its ideality, 
its mystery, its poetry and its possibilities of 
infinite progress, — is very far from being a 
system under which, as Mr. Balfour says, " in 
becoming perfectly good we shall all become 
perfectly idiotic." Who has ever measured the 
length and breadth and height of that human 
welfare which is its ideal.? As with Whittier's 
waterfall, — 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 47 

" Somewhere it laughs and sings, somewhere 
Whirls in mad dance its misty hair: 
But who hath raised its veil, or seen 
The rainbow skirts of that Undine ? " 

What opportunities are there for skill, courage, 
consecration, heroism, all that is noblest in man, 
to bring up the world, even as it now is, to its 
highest ethical standard, — unite the nations in 
peace, level up and level down society's horrible 
class inequalities, abolish vice and wrong and 
ignorance, make the " concert of Europe " 
something else than a symphony of battle guns, 
fill Turkish hearts with Armenian love, take the 
last stolen dollar out of man's hand, the last 
murdered bird off from woman's head, and 
teach countries that to knock their weaker 
brethren down on battle-fields and rob them of 
their colonies is no more Christian than for 
highwaymen to knock travelers down in streets 
and rob them of their cash. 

Then, with each new social state, each larger 
and complexer environment, something which is 
sure to come with evolution, how inevitably 
must there be a larger and complexer ethics for 
the promotion of its welfare. Said a fond 
mother looking down at her puling, squalling 
baby, " He is only eleven days old yet, and of 
course has some failings, but " — turning to the 
visitor — " I think he gives promise already of 
being at least a very truthful man." Human- 



48 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

ity now, as compared with its mighty future, is 
little more than eleven days old, but to the 
fond eyes of evolutionary ethics it gives prom- 
ise amid all, even of its puling and crying in- 
fancy, of a manhood, how large and true. 
Read Lecky's " History of European Morals " 
as some hint of the ethical progress, not only in 
virtues but in ideals of virtue, that we can 
fairly look for in the eighteen hundred years to 
come. Scientifically, as well as poetically, 
does earth have before it 

" A dream of man and woman 
Diviner but still human^ 
Solving the riddle old, 
Shaping the age of gold." 

And beyond earth, who can doubt that ethics 
with its new spiritual environment will have new 
heights to climb, new realms to enter upon, and 
that what here had to include the welfare of 
every hovel and every savage will have finally 
to include the welfare of every hell and every 
soul.? 

It is in this possibility that the peace of 
Christianity differs from the Nirvana of Bud- 
dhism. As fast as one faculty, one virtue, one 
part of our nature attains it, the vitality re- 
leased from the need of struggling for its at- 
tainment goes into the unfolding of another, 
and then another, just as it does now; and thus 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 49 

it becomes possible for the soul to go on climb- 
ing up forever the stairway of Jesus' command, 
" Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father 
which is in heaven is perfect." 

It is an ethics which in thus throwing its 
light forward, throws it backward, — gives the 
whole universe, even its darkest parts, a moral 
meaning. When we want to know whether a 
tree is good or bad, we do not use its roots, or 
trunk, or limbs or leaves as a criterion, much 
less its spines and bark, but its fruit ; and, if 
this is sweet and wholesome and what all the 
other parts have tended to produce, even 
though it is only a small part of its whole 
bulk, and appears only after many years of 
its life, we call the whole tree, including its 
darkest root and its sharpest spine, a good 
tree. 

Why should we not apply the same principle 
to our judgment of the universe, fruiting little 
by little in a moral man, — recognize it all 
through from nebulous root to the bark and 
spine of human cruelty and ignorance and sin 
as a moral universe? According to the funda- 
mental principles of evolution, all that will be 
in it at its highest reach of ethical attainment 
must have been as a possibility in its original 
fire mist. Matter is moral, gravity virtuous \ 
the dragons of far-off geologic ages 



50 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

" That tore each other in their slime " 

were a part of the violent who with their vio- 
lence were taking the kingdom of heaven. The 
roots of mercy are in the earthquake ; the seeds 
of love in the thunderbolt. Even sin has its 
side of saintliness ; even wrong its work for 
right. They are all the stages of an evolving 
universe, all a part of the things that are work- 
ing together for good. And justly they must 
all share in the character of its final outcome — 
the Satans of nature not less than of Job report 
at last as sons of God in the court of their com- 
mon Lord. 

Viewed thus, how rich is the subject, not only 
in philosophic interest but in its satisfaction to 
one of man's deepest heart wants. Cold as the 
word morality is sometimes thought to be, all 
our hopes, all our happiness, all our safe- 
guards, all the best parts even of love, are 
bound up with what it represents. Without an 
ethical element at the world's core, how little 
could the splendor of its skies, the grandeur of 
its mountains and seas, the abundance of its 
physical comforts, and its manifestations of 
majesty and might make it a really desirable 
dwelling place for beings like man, — as little 
so as a magnificent city in which was no provi- 
sion, outward or inward, for enforcing what is 



ETHICS OF EVOLUTION 51 

right. And it was the feeling that evolution 
did away with this element — deprived the 
world of a lawgiver, and so necessarily of a 
moral law, which prompted at first religion's op- 
position to Spencer and Darwin. How baseless 
the fear! Their teaching has revealed under 
the broken tables of Sinai the unbreakable 
tables of the soul, made the Sermon on the 
Mount a part of the sermon of the universe, 
and in place of a policeman God armed with a 
club, walking the world's streets, has unveiled a 
Divine Principle in the world itself whose wand 
is simply welfare. Evolution has done many 
wonderful things intellectually for man. It has 
lighted up the dark caverns of the earth below 
and flooded with radiance its vast animal and 
vegetable kingdoms up above. History has 
under it a new meaning; society a key which 
unlocks not a few of its intricacies ; religion the 
only lens which can focus again its broken 
lights. It has given to psychology the first 
glimmer of sense it ever had, and revealed in 
heredity marvels of the mind that render 
miracles commonplace. But its crowning gift, 
after all, tried alike by what it is and what it 
does, is — the Ethics of Evolution. 



II 

EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 

Man has always had a deep interest in ani- 
mals. When he first woke to consciousness 
from the sleep of his own brute infancy in the 
early morning of the world's day, possibly its 
tertiary hour, he found them already risen be- 
fore him, a habit of precedence they still keep 
up, crawling as insects over his face, singing as 
birds in his ear, sporting as quadrupeds at his 
side. The oldest works of art found on earth, 
Preraphaelite by at least two hundred thou- 
sand years, as well as in other qualities, are 
etchings of their forms on plates of reindeer 
horn exhumed from anteglacial caves ; and the 
liking for them and for pictures and stories 
about them, and the aptness for getting ac- 
quainted with them which all children exhibit 
to-day, are but the individual child repeating in 
himself, according to a well-known law of evo- 
lution, the intimacy and wonder for them which 
he learned originally in his childhood as a race. 
How close ever since have been his relations 

with them, how impressive to him their instincts 
52 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 53 

and intelligence, so like yet unlike his own, how 
many and varied their contributions to the 
beauty and glory of his dwelling-place and to 
the comfort and joy of himself! Beneath all 
outward differences they have been his fellow- 
citizens in the great kingdom of nature, his 
inevitable neighbors and associates, if not his 
recognized blood-relations, in the great family 
of life. Delegations of them have toiled with 
him at the plow, hunted with him in the chase, 
fed with him at the table, played with him at 
the fireside, traveled with him in the journey, 
fought with him on the battle-field. All the 
deeper experiences of his own existence — birth, 
growth, pain, pleasure, love's thrill, and death's 
agony — he has seen repeated in them. Lan- 
guage is filled with expressions for the qualities 
and activities they have in common — men^ 
wolfish and foxy ; bulls and bears in Wall 
Street ; camels, " ships of the desert " ; and 
ships in their turn " ocean greyhounds." 
Great nations have used them as the emblems 
of their power — made them play what a part 
in history as the Roman eagles, the British lion, 
and the Russian bear! Poetry has found in 
them some of its most suggestive themes, soar- 
ing with them how loftily in Bryant's Water- 
fowl, singing with them how sweetly in Shelley's 
Skylark, running with them how gracefully in 
Cowper's Hares, swinging with them how en- 



54 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

chantingly in Lowell's June bird, " atilt like a 
blossom among the leaves," and galloping with 
them how gloriously in Sheridan's steed bearing 
its rider and victory to Cedar Creek and a fly- 
ing army thirty miles away ! Who would lose 
out of fiction Ulysses's faithful dog, or the les- 
son-teaching asses, apes, and foxes of JEsop's 
Fables, or Don Quixote's Rozinante, or the 
Cid's Bavieca, or Scott's Antlered Monarch 
of the Waste, or Dickens's Boxer and Jip, or 
Poe's croaking Raven, or, later, Mrs. Sewell's 
Black Beauty, or even Mary's Little Lamb? 
With what a wealth of vigor and grace they 
have lent themselves to painting in the canvas 
of Landseer and of Rosa Bonheur, and to sculp- 
ture in such marbles as the Plunging Horses 
and the Farnese Bull ! Astronomy has taken 
them as its helper into the far-oif skies, bidding 
the north forever know its place with a Great 
and Little Bear, covenng the earth in its cool 
autumn nights with an Eagle's starry wings 
and establishing in the solemn heavens the 
never-stopping merry-go-round of its zodiacal 
Ram, Bull, Crab, Lion, Scorpion, Goat, and 
Fishes. And even in the midst of religion's 
grand service and majestic thoughts they have 
occupied how large a place both as the victims 
offered the gods and as the very gods they were 
offered to — even in our Christian faith have 
borne on their backs what mighty doctrines as 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 55 

the Serpent, the Worm, the Dove, the Lion of 
Judah, and the Lamb of God! 

It is out of this great wonder realm of ani- 
mal life, associated with man in so many ways 
and of which he himself is so vital a part, that 
zoology has arisen, seeking tO' arrange its ob- 
jects, to discover their structure, relations, and 
laws, and to get at their cause and reason. 
There is no other branch of science which alike 
in its materials and in itself is so full of in- 
terest, no other which embodies so completely 
the great world-wide principles of evolution and 
on the field of which the battles against it have 
been so fierce and the victories for it so bril- 
liant, no other which lets the student in so close 
to the very workshop and elbow of nature and 
so near to the great mystery of life, no other 
which opens so suggestively into the whole phi- 
losophy of man's own being, both physical and 
mental, individual and social, as this ; and a 
lecture devoted not so much to its details, need- 
ing years of study, as to its growth and larger 
teachings and to its bearing on these other 
themes, may have its modest place, even when 
the lecturer's qualification for it is only a love 
about equally divided between its outside live 
objects and its inside live truths. 

I. Looked at historically, the growth of the 
science itself has been along the direct lines not 



56 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

only of evolution, but of evolution in its Dar- 
winian phase of mounting up from species to 
species through variation, modifying environ- 
ment, a struggle for existence, and natural 
selection. In its beginnings and first forms, 
the same as with life itself, it was vague, nebu- 
lous, protoplasmic, consisting for ages of only 
such acquaintance with the habits and structure 
of animals as the hunter and the herdsman fol- 
lowing them in the chase and the field, and the 
priest and the householder cutting them up for 
the altar and the table, would be likely to ac- 
quire, and of such accounts of them as wonder 
and amazement would be likely to suggest. 
Even after collections of their varieties began to 
be made it was as objects of curiosity and 
amusement rather than of study ; and in regard 
to their very names, if it is not a puzzle as to 
how they were obtained from their more waspy^, 
bearish, and uncommunicative owners, as it 
was to John Phoenix how astronomers ever got 
at those of the stars, it is one, certainly, as to 
which animals those used in its earlier books 
were really meant for, so loose is their descrip- 
tion. 

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), that mountain 
mind which caught on its brow so many of the 
beams of wisdom's rising sun a thousand years 
before they touched the vales below, was the 
first observer to look on animals with the really 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 57 

scientific eye, describing minutely their wonder- 
ful varieties, and, by his divisions of them into 
oviparous, viviparous, and the like, recogniz- 
ing the need, if not the method, of their classi- 
fication. It was a work in which Alexander the 
Great was his friend and patron, putting at his 
service, it is said, millions of money and thou- 
sands of men, specimens also of all the new ani- 
mals and plants found by him in the countries 
he ravaged; and it is an interesting fact that 
while the empires over men that the great 
Macedonian established have long since passed 
away, and the glory that he won as a warrior 
become only a blot on the page of history, the 
little he did among the brutes was the founding 
of a kingdom that has gone on to gather all 
lands into its sweep and is the sole thing remem- 
bered now to his credit. 

But Aristotle, like advanced thinkers in all 
departments of life, even in religion itself, if a 
great help to progress, was also a great hin- 
drance ; if a mountain to catch long before- 
hand the beams of the rising sun, a mountain 
likewise to throw long afterward a deep dark- 
ness over the plain. For two thousand years 
men lingered in the shadow of his great name, 
studied what he had said about animals rather 
than animals themselves, and trembled lest in 
going beyond Aristotle they should go beyond 
truth. It was not till the seventeenth and 



58 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

eighteenth centuries, and with them the advent 
of Raj and Willoughby in England, Buffon in 
France, and preeminently Linnaeus in Sweden, 
that the science resumed its growth, one of the 
many instances in known history of a leaping 
from mind to mind over w^hole centuries with 
hardly a connecting link between, which ought 
to remove all difficulty about missing links in 
the ages before history when in accordance with 
the same law the leap was from species to spe- 
cies and from form to form. 

The great service of Linnseus (1707—1768) 
to zoology, the same as to botany, was his well- 
known twofold one of classification and of 
nomenclature. He was a new Adam in the 
Eden of science before whom each of its crea- 
tures passed again to be named, a scientific 
Napoleon in the kingdom of nature, who took 
its myriad inhabitants as a mob and organized 
them into the divisions, brigades, regiments, 
and companies of a vast army, each with its 
own distinctive uniform. And though his or- 
ganization, while serving well on some fields, has 
proved inadequate for science's advancing 
needs, his system of double names — one for 
genus and the other for species — has been of 
immense permanent value, and illustrates 
strikingly the new power that words with fixed 
meanings have to make charges with, bayonet- 
like, in the battles of thought. 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 59 

The work of Linnaeus was taken up and car- 
ried on yet further by Cuvier (1769-1832), 
the third great name in zoology. A new and 
vastly improved system of classification, based 
on the structure of its objects as a whole, 
rather than on a single feature of them, was 
added by him to its growth. The idea of its 
kingdom as a regular series, scala naturce, as- 
cending from zoophyte to man, which had 
hitherto prevailed, he supplanted with the con- 
ception of it as a tree-like structure, having 
four distinct branches — mollusc, radiate, 
articulate, and vertebrate — an immense gain. 
He was the first zoologist to enter the great na- 
ture-built museum of the rocks and recognize 
the exceeding value of its fossil treasures as 
the antecedents of living forms ; and his skill 
as a comparative anatomist is indicated by the 
fact that while his predecessors had mistaken 
the bones of creatures as wide apart as the ele- 
phant and the salamander for those of men, he 
out of a single tooth could reconstruct the 
whole body of an animal otherwise unknown. 

It was under him that zoology reached the 
maturity of its second great form, that of or- 
ganized knowledge, natural history ; and who 
can compare it with what it was to begin with, 
a mere unassorted collection of strange stories 
about animals, and not see that it was as much a 
transmutation of species as any that the primi- 



60 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

tive amoeBa ever underwent in mounting up 
from its original protoplasm to be an organized 
mammal ? 

Side by side with this process of classifica- 
tion, however, another one still more striking 
had already begun — that of asking what was 
the origin and cause of classes, and of trying 
to get at the laws and forces by which they had 
naturally come. As far back as the time of 
Linnaeus — not to go back to that of Hippocra- 
tes and Lucretius — BufFon (170T-1788) had 
given the question birth. He is usually ridi- 
culed as a dreamer rather than a scientist, a 
man who in studying animals vivisected them 
unopened with his imagination as a scalpel, and 
arranged them unpunctured with his philosophy 
as a pin; and indeed as a dealer with facts he 
is not for a moment to be compared with Lin- 
nseus and Cuvier. But he got hold in his 
dreaming of some things in nature that they 
with their eyes wide open for facts were ut- 
terly blind to ; he was a babe in zoology as com- 
pared with them, but, like the primitive anthro- 
poid, the babe of a new species. He reached 
forward in fancy to almost the exact thing that 
Darwin later found in fact, expressing it, how- 
ever, as he had to, in the subjunctive mood of 
church fear rather than with the indicative of 
scientific manhood. " If," he says, " we did 
not know the contrary to be the case by sure 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 61 

warrant, we might easily have concluded, so fal- 
lible is our reason, that animals always varied 
slightly, and that such variations, indefinitely 
accumulated, suffice to account for almost any 
amount of ultimate difference " — words that 
for delicate ingenuity in hinting a truth so as 
not to hurt a prejudice, serving God and yet 
not offending mammon, even a minister in the 
pulpit could hardly rival. 

The new species of zoology thus feebly begun 
developed in the time of Cuvier into a great 
school of brilliant thinkers who in their aims 
and methods were widely differentiated from 
the old stock. On the side of the past were the 
patient observers and careful experimentalists 
who held to the traditional doctrine of species 
as the immediate work of the Creator, and be- 
lieved in letting new theories about causes 
alone and in confining themselves to the collec- 
tion and arrangement of facts. On the other 
side were the bold speculators and nature-phi- 
losophers who believed in studying the causes 
which underlie the facts, and in all species as 
originating through natural laws out of a 
primitive stock, a side which embraced such ad- 
vocates as Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), who 
believed in a slow inward variability as leading 
to their differences; Lamarck (1744-1829), 
who ascribed them to the efforts accumulating 
through inheritance of the animals themselves ; 



62 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

St.-Hilaire (177^1844), who emphasized the 
action of the environment; Oken (1779—1851), 
who taught the doctrine of protoplasm and the 
cell; and Goethe (1749-1832), who explained 
the skull with all its wonders as only an en- 
largement of the upper spinal vertebra. The 
antagonism between the two schools widened 
gradually from word and work into feeling and 
friction ; and at last, in 1830, it broke out on 
the floor of the French Academy in an open 
dispute, headed by Cuvier on the one side and 
St.-Hilaire on the other, which for violence and 
ferocity the beasts themselves could hardly 
have excelled, the famous dispute which Goethe 
at his home in Weimar looked upon as of so 
much more importance than the French Revo- 
lution breaking out at the same time, that he 
could hardly imagine how his friend, when he 
spoke to him of " this great event," could think 
he referred to the mere political outbreak. 

Cuvier won the victory for the time in hand, 
nothing being able to withstand the torrent of 
facts that his brain, made on the mitrailleuse 
principle, was able to pour forth; and for 
thirty years he was the hero, the world over, of 
conservatism and the church. All the same, 
however, the new phase of the science kept on 
with its growth. Von Baer (1792-1876) 
opened and read the testimony of embryology; 
John Miller dissected and described, with an ac- 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 63 

curacy unknown before, the animal body; 
Richard Owen (1804-1892) pointed out the 
distinction of analogous and homologous mem- 
bers in comparative anatomy; Schwam (1810- 
1882) discovered with his miscroscope the 
starting-point in the cell of all animal life ; and 
Herbert Spencer formulated the great princi- 
ples of biology in his new synthetic phi- 
losophy. Then evolution, having done its work 
with observation and speculation, separated, 
took its next great step in order — that of in- 
tegrating them in a man who, with a minuteness 
and accuracy of observation which place him at 
the head of all fact-gatherers, united a skill 
of interpretation and a boldness of generaliza- 
tion which place him at the forefront of all 
truth-finders — Charles Darwin, the fourth 
great name in zoology; and the result was the 
" Origin of Species," and the transmuting of 
what with others had been a brilliant guess into 
a statement of the very laws and principles by 
which as a fact it had been brought about. It 
was itself another phase of its own doctrine — 
raised zoology to be a new species of science as 
distinct from those which had gone before it as 
ever man was from monkey. In its first form 
it was natural knowledge, in its second natural 
history, in its third natural science ; in its first 
fact, in its second order, in its third truth; in 
its first an unorganized amoeba, in its second a 



64 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

vertebrated animal, and in its third an intelli- 
gent man. It exists in all three of those forms 
to-day, just as other derived species do; has its 
museum and picture-book species, its cabinet 
and school-book species, and its ethical-society 
and philosophical-lecture species ; and people 
are interested sometimes in one, sometimes in an- 
other, and now and then in all three. 

With the proclamation of its new truth there 
came in natural order its struggle for existence, 
the world's modern thirty years' war. Against 
it have been brought to bear all the thunderbolts 
of theology, all the flippancies and squibs of the 
newspaper, all the stupidities and timidities of 
society at large, and alj the arguments the con- 
servative side of science could find in its arsenal. 
Agassiz's great work on " Classification," the 
crowning effort of zoology's old dispensation, 
was published by a striking coincidence the same 
year that gave to the animal world its new- 
evangel ; and even he had to say " Darwinism 
is a burlesque of facts," and " science would re- 
nounce the claim which it has hitherto possessed 
to the confidence of earnest minds if such 
sketches were to be accepted as indications of 
true progress " — words that evince how dis- 
tinctly a man may see facts and yet how utterly 
blind he may be to truths, how accurately know 
the trees of the forest and yet how ignorant be 
of the forest itself. 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 65 

On the other side have stood from the start 
such names as those of Wallace, Spencer, Tyn- 
dall, Huxley, Haeckel, themselves masters in the 
realms of thought. Little by little Cuvier's 
great victory on the floor of the French Acad- 
emy, gloried in for thirty years as the triumph 
of fact over theory, observation over specula- 
tion, has been turned to defeat. The facts 
themselves, whole regiments of them, enlisted so 
carefully under the banners of observation, 
some the very ones that Agassiz himself gath- 
ered, have mutinied against their own leaders 
and have put in their sturdiest blows in behalf 
of theory. Darwin's doctrine, whether or not 
it is regarded as the whole truth about descent, 
is held, almost without exception, to be a large 
piece of it, the grandest generalization yet 
reached in zoological progress. And Darwin 
himself stands forth to-day a testimony for- 
ever to the value of the speculative reason, as 
well as of the plodding, practical, fact-gather- 
ing senses, as an agency in winning victories 
even on the fields of material science. 

But while recognizing thus the inward grow- 
ing force of zoology's great names and the 
struggle for existence it went through, there is 
another element of evolution working with them 
in producing its changes, which is not to be for- 
gotten — that of its environment and of the 
world's general unfolding knowledge. Meat- 



66 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

eating, and with it the need of cutting crea- 
tures up, making in every butcher's shop a dis- 
secting-room ; medicine, and with it the study 
of man's structure ; vaticination, and with it the 
inspection of animal bodies, each of these must 
have contributed largely at the start to its 
knowledge of facts. The discovery and ex- 
ploration of America in the fifteenth, sixteenth, 
and seventeenth centuries, bringing to its 
hands a multitude of new animals, brought 
about almost as a necessity the classificatory 
stage into which it then developed. And 
geology, revealing a score of other new worlds 
with their missing links under the old one's feet ; 
the microscope, revealing still another score in 
the old one's every drop of water; astronomy, 
explaining with its nebular hypothesis the origin 
of a myriad worlds from one primal mist ; 
chemistry, explaining with its atomic theory the 
origin of a myriad substances from possibly one 
primal element ; Lyell, explaining with his uni- 
formatory doctrine the production of all the 
varieties of rock from one central mass; 
Harvey, explaining with his circulation of the 
blood the moving of a thousand little drops 
from one common fountain of life ; and Herbert 
Spencer, explaining with his grand synthetic 
philosophy the evolution of the universe as a 
whole from one starting-point of matter and 
force, all sweeping along in the same path of a 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 67 

single natural cause for a series of widely dif- 
ferent results — all surrounded zoology with an 
atmosphere which inevitably helped to sweep its 
thinkers on to Darwin's like new truth. 

Even the changing climate of the religious 
world was not without its modifying effect. 
The zoological mind, the same as the thinking 
mind everywhere, felt the inspiring warmth of 
the new summer, the delicious trouble in the 
moral ground, that with the Reformation began 
coming to the world of men. Ideas that Buff on 
could only hint in the cellar, Darwin could pro- 
claim unhindered on the house-top. The scep- 
ticism of religion became the faith of science. 
And just in proportion as the Church got rid of 
its doctrine that man had gone down from his 
primitive perfection to being " a worm of the 
dust," it became possible for the lecture-room 
to show that his being a worm was the very con- 
dition from which he had come up. 

Nor were humbler agencies lacking as con- 
tributors to the grand result. Darwin no- 
toriously was started on the track of his doc- 
trine of how species originate by what he found 
in the farmyard and the garden. The experi- 
ence of breeders down through long ages had 
accumulated a vast fund of practical knowl- 
edge on the subject, overlooked by other 
scientists, that he was not ashamed to sit at 
their feet and learn. Hodge was found not to 



68 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

have raised his pigs through so many genera- 
tions only for pork. The story of the crafty 
Jacob in the sheepfolds of old Laban was dis- 
covered to have a truth in it beyond anything 
the most inveterate believer in biblical infalli- 
bility had ever dreamed of. Doves, drawing 
of old the chariot of Venus, drew for him the 
fairer one of wisdom. Mares bred to win 
prizes at the Derby were taught under his 
touch to win them on the race-course of science. 
And while other men had sought truth by con- 
verse with the gods, and thought of it as too 
holy a thing to be enshrined in aught but 
learned tongues, its nineteenth-century disciple 
found it, like the Magi of old, cradled in a 
stable and uttering itself in that most despised 
of all things, " horse talk," illustrating anew 
Emerson's words: 

** 'Tis not in the high stars alone, 

Nor in the cups of budding flowers, 

Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone. 

Nor in the bow that smiles thro' showers. 

But in the mud and scum of things 

That alway, alway something sings ! ** 

II. Passing now from what zoology has been 
historically as an embodiment of evolution to 
what it is scientifically as a field for it, how 
widely already has it opened its gate for its en- 
trance ! It is not indeed the whole of its sphere. 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 69 

The starry heavens, the rock-ribbed earth, the 
chemical elements, the vast realm of botany, and 
who shall say how largely the kingdom of mind, 
are other rooms in its great house. But it is one 
of its most important departments — one that, 
with the great mystery of life already its occu- 
pant, it seemed beforehand almost impossible for 
it to enter. All its great fundamental principles 
— homogeneousness at the start, differentia- 
tion, rhythmic movement, the multiplication of 
effects, integration, and then dissolution and 
the use of its materials over again in a new se- 
ries — all these, with some others, as natural 
selection, peculiar to its own realm, it illustrates 
with marvelous beauty alike in the individual 
and the race, evinces it as holding good in the 
realms of flesh and life as well as in those of 
matter and force, shows that what made the 
star made the soul, that what organized the 
earth organized its inhabitants, and that the 
highway of creation trod out of primal fire-mist 
over whirling atom, tenuous nebula and blazing 
sun, over cooling planet, heaving continent and 
quaking rock, was not ended or interrupted 
when it came to man and mind. It is not 
strange that to the world at large Darwinism 
means the same thing as evolution. Without 
the " Origin of Species " to lead the way it is 
doubtful whether the " First Principles of a 
New Philosophy " would ever have got beyond 



ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

the scholar's study. It was its victory on the 
field of zoology that forced it into the ears and 
faith of the general public. With the citadel 
of life carried by its logic and the myriad armies 
of the animal world made its captives, it was 
felt that the whole vast fort of the universe 
might as well be surrendered to it at once as 
wait for an assault it now became certain noth- 
ing could resist. 

What a field, too, it affords for its further 
progress ! Darwin's discovery, with all it did 
for it, was but a stage along its way, not by 
any means its goal. It gives us the doctrine 
of animal descent, starts the student on the 
right track for all coming investigation; but 
the actual lines of their descent, the ages and 
order in which their different classes, families, 
genera, and species have branched off from the 
common stock and from each other ; in .short, 
the construction of that vast genealogical tree, 
world-wide and ages high, on which each mem- 
ber of the animal family shall have its place 
marked — that, except it be in Haeckel's im- 
perfect outlines and with a few ancestors of 
the horse, is as yet hardly touched. Depart- 
ments for its study that were thought of old to 
be outside of zoology are brought by the 
" Origin of Species " directly within its sphere. 
Ontogeny, the science of the individual, is made 
by its principles as much a part of it as is phy- 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 71 

logeny, the science of the race. Embryology, 
once regarded as hardly a fly-leaf in its mighty 
volume, is found under it to be a most precious 
table of contents, repeating with the child in a 
few months what it took ages to accomplish 
with its parents, and giving in its summary 
whole chapters again, ages long, which in the 
book itself earthquakes have blotted out and 
oceans covered up, opening, therefore, what a 
new world for evolutionary eyes ! Morphol- 
ogy, the science of structure, the study of the 
origin of the organs inside of the body - — as 
much species as the animals which are outside of 
it — what made them vary from their original 
homogeneous protoplasm into all the complexi- 
ties of their present condition, three hundred 
thousand fibers, for instance, in a single optic 
nerve, and why is it that each animal and each 
species has the exact size and shape and number 
of limbs and of senses that it does — all as much 
a matter of law as the shape of crystals or the 
orbit of planets — all this is legitimately within 
its zoological sphere. Then, with man as an ani- 
mal, sociology, the study of the laws and forces 
which evolve society, is surely as much a part 
of it as is the study of those which gather the 
bee in hives and the ant in hills ; and especially 
comparative sociology, an investigation of the 
common elements which run through all collec- 
tions of animals froni those oj^ the insect up. 



72 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

how much has it got here to learn — what a 
help, also, we find from it in solving some of the? 
social problems that we are vainly now seeking 
wisdom for among ourselves, giving a new point 
to old Solomon's words, " Go to the ant, thou 
sluggard, consider her ways and be wise." 
And, crowning all, psychology, the marvels of 
mind and soul, the wonder that fills and over- 
flows this wonder of body — consciousness, love, 
thought, aspiration — how they unfolded out 
of protoplasm with the body, what they root 
in and what they lead to, all these have got to 
be studied henceforth in connection with ani- 
mals — are for some future Darwin to make 
discoveries in as much beyond the " Origin of 
Species " as the " Origin of Species " is beyond 
the animal pictures that the old troglodytes 
drew on their half-eaten bones in the caves of 
Dordogne and La Madelaine. 

III. Proceeding from the historic and scien- 
tific aspects of the subject, we find it unfolding 
into still another species of truth, one which in 
some respects is the most interesting and im- 
portant of all. Evolution is not only a history 
and a science. It is also a philosophy. It 
embraces not only facts and causes, but with 
them reasons — asks not only what and how, 
but, likewise, why. And after giving us in 
its department of zoology the natural history 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 73 

of animals and the methods and causes of their 
origin as species and individuals one from an- 
other, it is met at once with the further ques- 
tion of why their existence and descent in this 
way, what the object of the myriads of them 
that lived and struggled and died before men 
came on earth, as well as of the myriads that 
are doing it now — a page of nature written 
how deep in blood — what the philosophy of 
their different forms, many of them so repulsive 
and monstrous, and of man's being born out 
of their loins, as Darwin represents, instead 
of his coming up directly out of the dust and 
with a human shape to start with, as theology 
so long has taught. 

There is doubtless a sense in which animals 
are their own end, a side of philosophy which 
must recognize that, like beauty and the multi- 
plication table and man himself, the ugliest 
beast and the humblest worm are their " own 
excuse for being." 

" Know Nature's children all divide her care ; 
The fur that warms a monarch warmed a bear. 
While man exclaims, * See all things for my use.* 
* See man for mine/ replies the pampered goose.'* 

And yet it is not the less true that a secondary 
purpose, a vein, if not of the old, Paley, watch- 
maker teleology, yet of practical good sense 
and of a reason for things, does run every- 



74 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

where through nature. And it is this that 
evolution finds shining out as a vein of gold 
from the dark strata of paleontology and from 
the forms even of the most monster-like brutes. 
Not to dwell on their work in making the 
earth's continents and soils, and in elaborating 
its crude inorganic elements into nourishing 
foods, the why of their existence, of their forms 
in the past, and of the whole process of their 
growth from monad up to man, is to be found in 
Darwin's doctrines of variation and heredity — 
in their acquisition of organs and qualities by 
variation step by step in the only environment 
that was fitted for their production, and then in 
the transmission of them by inheritance from 
species to species up into higher surroundings 
and finer shapes, and at last into their existing 
completeness. Animals have been not merely the 
lineal ancestors, but beyond this the necessary 
makers of humanity, the only possible builders 
not only of man's dwelling place and man's food, 
but of man himself. Nature's method of phy- 
logenic growth, made inevitable apparently 
by her own inherent laws, has been herself to 
push forward an organ a little way, and then 
to set its recipients to using it with their own 
will-power over and over, till at last, like the 
beating of our hearts, it unconsciously did it- 
self, and then to employ her vitality, released 
from this work, in pushing out still another 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 75 

organ on which the process was repeated; and 
so on, the gain of one generation being trans- 
ferred by inheritance to the next, a thing im- 
possible, you see, under the old idea of species 
as independent creations. The uniting of its 
four great elements, in some respects the most 
refractory of nature, into the original pro- 
toplasmic mortar out of which all animals are 
built up, had probably to be done millions of 
times by its low amoebic forms before they got 
the habit of staying united; and every step 
of the wonderful organization and function- 
ing to which it has now arrived in humanity 
has been taken by having myriads of animals 
along the way go through with its various op- 
erations of digestion, respiration, nerve-action, 
sense-perception, blood-circulation and the like, 
again and again till what at first was direct 
effort — done by giving their minds to it — 
became at last involuntary action, done with- 
out a thought. Man is indeed a bundle of 
habits, and a bundle formed not only by him- 
self, but by all the multitudes of creatures that 
are in the lines of his descent back to the first 
amoeba that ever ate its bit of brother slime. 
A few years ago, as a German naturalist was 
watching the hatching of an egg, he noticed 
that after the shell had broken apart, and 
while the chick was yet in one side of it, a fly 
lighted on the other. Instantly the little crea- 



76 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

ture, not wholly hatched as yet, darted its bill 
out for the fly and caught it and ate it up ; 
and in doing so, the naturalist reckoned that 
it must have made, bodily and mentally, at 
least three thousand co-ordinated motions, each 
one of them absolutely perfect. Where did it 
get its skill? " Instinct," said old igno- 
rance. " Inherited habit," says new evolution. 
Millions of mature chickens in the generations 
before it had spent their lives in catching flies, 
and the skill they had acquired came down to 
their descendant in its blood. So with man in 
his facility for catching flies, whether they be 
in the shape of milk on his mother's breast, or 
of base-ball on the playground, or, further 
along, of crinkled lightning on the breast of 
earth, it comes how largely from the skill of 
muscle trained into him by the brutes. We live 
not only outwardly on strata of rock filled with 
their bones, but inwardly on strata of flesh 
filled with their deeds. The whole marvelous 
story of paleontology is recapitulated in 
every babe that creeps, the four-footed ways 
of its fossils in the very creeping itself. Hon- 
estly indeed, as the saying is, do boys come 
by the monkey tricks and the habits of sliding 
down banisters and climbing up trees, reck- 
less of clothes, they are so notorious for, ac- 
quired in far-off^ tropic forests when literally 
it was " Rock-a-by, baby, in the tree-top," 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 77 

and when the only nursery tales they had to 
amuse themselves with were what they carried 
appended to their own bodies, and the only 
pantaloons to tear, those which their mother 
nature had made. Primeval heats, which blot- 
ted all traces of the Eozoon out of Laurentian 
limestone, left the marks of it cindered on the 
inner, more imperishable bed-rock of the geol- 
ogist himself who goes out in its search. And 
live men are not only " dead men warmed over," 
as Holmes has expressed it, but with them dead 
animals warmed over, whose subtler selves, 
never dying, still wriggle and crawl and climb 
in our every bone and nerve. 

The value of the unconscious automatic func- 
tioning thus established in the human body it 
is hardly possible to overestimate. Suppose 
that man had to superintend and execute each 
act of his physical living by the direct con- 
scious exercise of his own will; suppose the 
sailor, reefing the topgallant sails of his ship 
in a tornado, with the masts swinging through 
the air like whips and the lightnings jabbing 
through it like bayonets, had at the same time 
to keep the pumps going of his own heart ; or 
that the orator, while filling his audience with 
inspiring thoughts, had with every respiration 
to give part of his mind to the filling of his own 
lungs with breath ; or that the poet, right in the 
midst of his subtle fancies and revelings in the 



78 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

ideal world, had ever and anon to turn his eye 
in a fine frenzy rolling down on to his liver to 
keep it from idling, or in along his digestive 
apparatus to make sure its thousand little nu- 
trients were not sending his nourishment off to 
the wrong places — what power or time would 
they have left for success in their immediate 
human work? More to us than any outward 
legacies from human parents are those inher- 
ited habits within that we are all bom to from 
our animal progenitors. It is because they 
used their volitions and vitality so well in the 
establishment of such physical ones that we 
are able to go on and use ours for the estab- 
lishment of those that are intellectual and 
moral. Out of their awful conflicts in the long 
past, seemingly the expressions only of ferocity 
and cruelty have come to us for use in the 
mighty moral conflicts of civilization. 

** The wrestling thews that throw the world." 

" Thirty centuries look down upon you," said 
Napoleon to his soldiers as they went forth to 
the battle of the Pyramids. Thirty eons look 
down upon — nay, j oin you and fight with you 
— evolution says to every man who goes 
forth to the battle of life. And with such an 
inheritance from the brutes is it a thing very 
discreditable to us that we have had them as our 
ancestors — a philosophy wholly without sig- 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 79 

nificance which shows thus the reason for na- 
ture's method of human descent? 

It is a philosophy, moreover, which holds 
good not only with reference to those species 
of animals which are in the direct line of man's 
origin, but in some measure of all the side 
ones, also, that have branched off from it and 
ended only in themselves. Mr. Dawson urges 
it as an argument against Darwinian evolution 
that the trilobite, after existing all through 
the Silurian and Devonian ages, finally died 
out without giving rise to any new forms of 
life. It is a kind of reasoning which hardly 
looks further than their own stony eyes. The 
trilobites did their work and answered the why 
of their existence by the nutriment they af- 
forded the surviving main stock of animal life. 
It is a part of the magnificent economy of na- 
ture, one of the reconciling features in its hor- 
rible system of having animals eat each other 
up, that its very failures are used thereby to 
make its successes — its creatures that perish 
in their struggle for existence are made to live 
and triumph in those which survive. The dis- 
t^inction between eater and eaten, as we go 
down the scale of being, grows continually less 
and less. Reproduction by nutrition is only 
the opposite side of reproduction by fission. 
When a big amoeba eats a small one, the result 
is a new creature almost as much as when 



80 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

higher up the two parents unite their lives 
in that of a child. Indeed, there are some 
cases where the new food is a direct agent in 
producing a new species. Inheritance in na- 
ture is from branches as well as roots, from 
uncles and aunts as well as from fathers and 
mothers. The lower limbs of a forest tree 
are not the less necessary for its growth, nor 
the less represented in its final fruit, because 
its top boughs ^row on it elsewhere, leaving 
the bottom ones to be overshadowed and die. 
And whole species of animals have done the 
same thing for man's stock in the past that in- 
dividual animals and plants are doing now — 
elaborated its food and food qualities out of 
coarse, inorganic elements up into what was 
most akin to its own flesh and blood. 

Of course the process has been a very slow 
one — myriads of animals to establish a single 
habit, ages of time to deposit a single organ. 
But time with those animal antediluvians was 
of no especial value, a million years but as a 
watch in the night, and a small eternity but 
as yesterday when it was passed. It was the 
one thing and the only thing that in those days 
they had to do; and it was what right in the 
midst of their frolicking and fighting and eat- 
ing each other up they could go on doing just 
as well. And here again is where nature's 
economy comes in and the reason comes out 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 81 

why the originators of man were brutes in- 
stead of higher beings and why he was not set 
to build himself. It was as brutes with brute 
shapes and brute tastes that they could best 
make what is animal in man. It was proto- 
plasm alone that was plastic enough to begin 
with, protoplasm alone that could be the flask 
in which life could imprison the four great 
genii of matter. Rough claws shaped parts 
of man grandly where fine fingers would have 
miserably failed. And what would have been 
the sense of having a creature with fifty ounces 
of brain in his skull at work generation after 
generation on the stomach, lungs, heart, and 
eye just to establish in them the habit of in- 
voluntary action, when a ganoid fish with a 
pennyweight of skull-stuff, or a megalosaur 
reptile with all the cycles of Cathay at his 
command, could do it vastly better? I have a 
young friend, a machinist, who keeps a few 
barn-yard fowls for his amusement, and who, 
like most amateurs in that line, became fasci- 
nated one year with the idea of raising young 
spring chickens ahead of nature by means of 
an incubator. So one Sunday morning, dis- 
regarding the remonstrances of mother, wife, 
and sister, he went to consult a friend in the 
city who already had one on his hands. His 
friend showed him his instrument, its spirit- 
lamps and steam-pipes and hundred eggs in 



82 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

their compartments, and then told him how 
careful he had to be in its management, sitting 
up all night to watch the thermometer and 
feed the lamps and to keep everything right, 
and then took him solemnly out into the back 
yard where were two other sets of a hundred 
eggs all spoiled, one because he had left .the ap- 
paratus fifteen minutes in the care of a small 
boy who had let them roast, and the other be- 
cause he himself had gone to sleep a moment 
or two the twentieth night and let them chill. 
" Now, Joe," said he, with a melancholy air, 
" if you will take the benefit of my experience, 
so long as your time as a machinist is worth 
more than that of an old setting hen as an 
incubator, I should advise you to stick to your 
lathe and let the old setting hen hatch the 
chickens." And that is what nature did in 
hatching the chicken qualities of her myriad 
creatures in the early spring of life — used not 
her thinking man, but her brooding hens to be 
their incubator. And slow and muddle-headed 
as they were, how grand is the resulting body 
which has come out of their nest! How sup- 
ple and varied its powers, how marvelous its 
organization ! What a strain it has stood of 
battle-fields and long abuses and accidents by 
field and flood, what a foundation proved on 
which to build the enormous structure of mind, 
what a new significance given to the pious 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 83 

hymn of good old Dr. Watts that alike saint 
and scientist can for once unite in singing — 

" Fearful and wondrous is the skill that molds 
Our body's vital plan, 
And from the first dim hidden germ unfolds 
The perfect limbs of man ! " 

And with all the work there is still before it as 
the agent of mind, all the business cares and 
social problems and weights of philosophy and 
science, all the marvels of our coming civiliza- 
tion, that are yet to be piled up on its brain, 
who shall say it is a particle too strong, who 
feel that those old brutes with their myriad 
years took for its building one hour too much, 
who not fear, with it breaking down so often 
even now, that the future may show that those 
tertiary anthropoids who put on it its final 
touches before the superstructure of reason 
was begun, hurried up their part of the work 
a little too fast? 

Nor is it body alone that man owes to the 
brutes. In them, too, were laid all the great 
foundation stones of mind, heart, and soul! 
And how far back in their blood do some of 
the qualities reach which seem now to be most 
distinctively the badges of human superiority! 
Little did that old amphibian think, when he 
saw under far Devonian skies the fish-fins with 
which he had come out of the water separate 



84 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

into the ten phalanges of his fore limbs, that 
he was laying the foundations of an arithmetic 
that was to count at last the stars of heaven 
with its digits and measure the distances of 
Sirius and the nebulae with its multiple; little 
those " dragons of the prime that tare each 
other in their slime " imagine that out of their 
conflicts they were storing up in their blood a 
courage, energy, and pluck that were to fight 
the great battles of liberty when bayonets 
were to be the claws and steam rams the tusks, 
and win victories for truth when ideas should 
be the horns, and arguments the jaws; little 
that early batrachian, who called his mate to 
him with a croak, foresee that his vocal faculty 
was to go on developing itself through human 
voices till it broke forth in the eloquence of a 
Demosthenes, drove reform to its mark in the 
sarcasm of a Phillips, and went up to heaven in 
a song the angels might hush their own to 
hear of a Nilsson and an Abbott. Love, with 
its mother tenderness and its sex-passion 
climbing in humanity to what splendors of 
poetry and romance, has its root down how far 
amid the tenants of the rocks. Society and its 
duties, and that " social contract " about which 
philosophers have had so much to say, were 
made for man by the Rousseaus and St. Simons 
of an ancestry that went on all fours — had 
already been in existence millions of years at 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 85 

the period when the great Frenchman thought 
of them as being formed, and can no more be 
overturned now than our human nature itself. 
A large part of our moral uprightness ante- 
dates our walking physically upright. A few 
years ago a family on the Hudson, going away* 
for their summer vacation, left in their cellar 
a piece of meat which they showed their pet 
dog as the food he was to live on in their ab- 
sence. The dog, however, mistook their ges- 
tures and supposed it was food he was meant to 
guard. Three weeks afterward, the family re- 
turning, found the faithful creature's starved 
bones beside the untouched meat. Who does 
not wish that at least an equal share of the 
fidelity which had thus come down to the little 
dog out of his brute ancestry had descended to 
some of the bank presidents and insurance- 
company trustees that are set to watch peo- 
ple's financial meat.? Even as regards religion, 
not from the lips of angels, but very pos- 
sibly from the insight of animals, did its first 
knowledge come. The terror they manifest in 
the presence of objects which to them are un- 
canny, as when a horse shies at a bit of whirl- 
ing paper or at anything in motion whose pro- 
pelling power he does not see, in spite of the 
other explanations given of it, is impressively 
like the dread which lies at the base of all sav- 
age worship and which civilized man, his chil- 



86 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

dren especially, who repeat in so many ways 
their far-off ancestral experience, feels in the 
dark and at the hearing of strange sounds. 
It suggests, how inevitably, their common 
origin in a four-footed worshiper who was 
their common progenitor — is "a fear of the 
Lord " starting in the awful shadow of pri- 
meval woods that was the beginning of a wis- 
dom which is to sing and soar at last in what 
splendors of Christian day! And with such 
inheritances, bodily and mental, received from 
animals, is it not about time that the words 
brutal, beastly, and the like, as designating 
what is worst in man, should have a rest? The 
really brutal and beastly qualities we have de- 
rived from them are often a hundredfold more 
and better than the human ones that the per- 
sons thus described have added to them since. 
Our animal infancy as a race is just as honor- 
able to us and just as worthy of being referred 
to with tender regard as our animal infancy as 
individuals, the two being exactly of a piece. 
And instead of making it our aim, " working 
out the beast, to let the ape and tiger die," 
ought we not rather to keep them in us tamed 
and civilized as the beasts of burden to carry 
us on their backs, as no outward ones can, in 
the long, long way our human nature is yet to 
travel ? 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 87 

IV. It is a question which opens up into the 
last and crowning phase that zoology as in- 
terpreted by Darwin has entered upon, and 
that is a morality that shall include animals 
as well as men among its objects and a religion 
that shall save civilized brutes from the hell so 
many of them are now in as well as savage 
heathen from the one they are threatened with 
by and by. What hitherto has been only a 
kindly sentiment warring against the wretched 
cruelty that in so many forms they have been 
subject to is based by the " Origin of Species " 
and the " Descent of Man " on a solid founda- 
tion of science. Sharing with them the mem- 
bership of one larger animal body, we inevitably 
share with them also the great divine law, 
alike natural and scriptural, that " if one mem- 
ber suffer, all the members suffer with it, and 
if one member be honored, then all the mem- 
bers rejoice with it." A lady, on getting a 
kitten for her little boy to play with, told him 
as a means of keeping him from doing it harm 
that only half of it — the hind half — was 
his, and that she was going to keep the other 
half — its head — as hers. The next day, sit- 
ting in the parlor, she overheard a terrible cry 
of animal pain coming from the play-room, 
and exclaimed : " O Tommy, Tommy ! what 
are you doing to my end of the kitten.'' " " I 
ain't doing nothing to your end," was the an- 



88 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

swer. " I only pinched my end, and it was 
your end that squawked." And that is what 
Darwin has taught us with regard to the whole 
animal kingdom, man included, that it is only 
a larger kitten, and that cruelty can not pinch 
the meanest worm at its tail without having its 
farthest human end squawk, can not do any 
part of it needless harm without having it re- 
act through nerves subtler than those of flesh, 
and harm the harmer also — the frightened 
calf poison its eater, and the whip that scars 
the horse's flesh at one end ply an unseen lash 
at the other, scarring with its every stroke the 
driver's soul. Revealing our origin from a 
common stock, it is not only the good Samari- 
tan, but his good ass also that is made by it 
our neighbor ; not only the savage man, but the 
savage beast that is our brother; not only at 
the tomb of Adam in Palestine, but at the tomb 
of the eozoon, nature-built, in the primeval 
rock, that we can stand, weeping, if we will, 
and say, " A distant relative to be sure, and 
yet a relative." And all the reasons that 
ethics can show based on self-interest, grati- 
tude, blood connection, and the mystery of a 
common life-tie for the exercise of justice, 
kindness, and the Golden Rule toward the low- 
est man, it shows hold equally good for their 
exercise toward the humblest brute. Philan- 
thropy is widened by it into 7.oophily; humani- 



k 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 89 

tarianism into panzoism ; altruism between 
man and man into altruism between man and 
all that lives. It completes the great circle 
that theology has traveled from its finding of 
Deity at first in animals out in its search for 
him into the infinite, and then back through 
man to its finding of him in their life again — 
makes it the word of science as well as poetry 
that 

" He prayeth well who loveth well 
Both man and bird and beast." 

And though its practical influence in doing 
away with cruelty is yet only partially felt, it 
has the potency in it of truth, and it is as sure 
at last to bring about a reform in their treat- 
ment as Christianity is in that of human beings. 
Darwin was the Apostle to the Gentiles of the 
forest, field, and flood; the Light of Asia to 
the darkened world of the brute ; and as he 
" passed on " to his great discovery it is not 
difiicult imagining their myriads as doing for 
him what Arnold represents them as doing for 
Siddartha of old: 

" Large wondering eyes 
Of woodland creatures — panther, boar, and deer — 
At peace that eve gazed on his face benign 
From cave and thicket. Bright butterflies 
Fluttered their vans, azure and green and gold, 
To be his fan-bearers. The doves flocked round. 



90 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

And e'en the creeping things were 'ware and glad. 
Voices of earth and air joined in one song 
Which unto ears that hear said, * Lord and Friend, 
This is the night the ages waited for.' " 

And now, under the reign of these new in- 
fluences in their behalf, what does evolution 
point to as likely to be the whole final outcome 
to animals from their long struggle for exist- 
ence, what their own place at last on the great 
life-tree they have done so much to nourish — 
a look into their future which surely may not 
unfitly close our look into their long past.? 
Philosophers are not wanting who have held 
that, sharers of man's mortality here, they will 
be sharers of whatever immortality awaits him 
in the realms beyond. Mourners of household 
pets have easily agreed with the poor Indian 

" Who thinks, admitted to that equal sky. 
His faithful dog will bear him company." 

And there are some sportsmen, I verily believe, 
animated with a somewhat different shade of 
interest, to whom heaven would lose half its 
attraction if they thought its river of life was 
to have no speckled trout in its waters waiting 
to be caught, its tree of life no robins and 
squirrels among its branches placed there to be 
shot at, its New Jerusalem no blooded trotters 
on its golden pave to be bet upon, and its fields 
of amaranth and asphodel no flying fox and 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 91 

hunting hounds to gallop over in the merry 
chase. 

But without speculating on their condition 
beyond the realms of time, we can reasonably 
look forward, under the light of evolution, to 
their developing side by side with man in the 
long future which is before him on earth, and 
to their sharing with him — at least their more 
saintly representatives — that ideal state, the 
golden age of heathendom and the millennium 
of Christianity, which beyond question our ex- 
isting world is to ripen into before it passes on 
to its final stage. Mosquitoes may not tune 
their voices in its dewy airs, nor rattlesnakes 
join their harps in its choral song, but it is 
hard to think of a perfect earth, even with its 
silver questions all settled and its social prob- 
lems all solved, that is not to be musical with 
the song of birds, graceful with the forms of 
quadrupeds, and alive with myriads of the 
happy things which have labored so long to 
build it up — as hard as it is to think of a 
flower, however fair, that is not the fairer when 
encircled with its chaplet of leaves. Its poison- 
ous reptiles, its pestiferous insects, and its 
more ravenous and untamable beasts, unrepent- 
ing sinners of the swamp and fen, will doubt- 
less die out, for universal salvation, however 
true it may be of man, and even of the old the- 
ological serpent, can hardly be stretched out 



92 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

wide enough, even by its most determined ad- 
vocate, to cover the snake in the grass and the 
worm in the flesh — killed off not so much by 
human hands as by the earth's changing clime. 
But with these gone it will be all the easier for 
its better ones to survive, preserved alike by 
nature's softened laws and man's co-operating 
care. Its woods will still be merry with the 
frisky squirrel and its airs sweet with the song 
of birds ; its brooks still alive with the silver 
gleam of scales and its meadows with their 
painted btitterflies and golden-trousered bees ; 
its tropics still have their winged rainbows and 
feathered gems ; and its mountain thrones and 
courts of snow their eagle kings and nature- 
ermined lords. The same principle of ripened 
stock, better living, and more mental activity 
that operates among men to lay the Marthu- 
sian specter of over-population some philoso- 
phers are now troubled with, will obtain among 
animals to keep their numbers from ever crowd- 
ing the earth. Death will round off their old 
age with its sleep the same as it will that of 
human beings even in their perfect state — a 
death as painless as that which the cells of our 
bodies in passing from living tissue to waste 
matter already every day undergo. With the 
earth's grains and fruits perfected and the 
chemical means discovered of producing arti- 
ficial nitrogenous foods, all need of their 



EVOLUTION AND ANIMAL LIFE 93 

slaughter and all taste for their flesh will have 
passed away. 

And at last, with the material world all per- 
fected, as some day it must be, and our human 
world all freed from its sins and shames and 
wrongs, as some day it shall be — 

" Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent pas- 
sion killed, 
Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing des- 
ert tilled/* 

love shall have in the animal world all forms of 
life as its own; 

" The spirit of the Lord 
Lie potent upon man and beast and bird " ; 

and in no small degree literally as well as 
figuratively, old Isaiah's prophetic vision shall 
be fulfilled : " The lion shall eat straw like the 
ox; the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and 
the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the 
fatling and the young lion together, and a lit- 
tle child shall lead them, and they shall not 
hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith 
the Lord." 



Ill 

EVOLUTION AND WAR 

It is a well proclaimed, though not always a 
well practised maxim of good citizenship, that 
the legislator, the reformer, the political 
economist, the voter, everybody who is to have 
anything to do with discussing and directing 
the affairs of society and the State, ought to 
have, as a preparation for it, a knowledge of 
history, — that is, of what other men in other 
days have done and have tried to do in the 
same great fields. Equally important is it, 
also, as we are now beginning to see, that such 
persons should have, as a requisite for their 
fullest intelligent action, a like acquaintance 
with science, and especially with those depart- 
ments of science, as zoology and paleontology, 
which relate to what animals and plants have 
done, and with their great interpreter, evolu- 
tion. Human history is but the last chapter in 
a vast volume, many chaptered, of the world's 
transactions, impossible to be understood with- 
out reading in its preceding ones what our an- 
cestors older than man have been doing; hu- 
94 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 95 

man society, as Mr. Spencer has so admirably 
shown in his " Principles of Sociology," is but 
the enlargement and further development of 
organisms spread all through the animal and 
vegetable kingdoms, on which nature has been 
at work for millions of years. The root and 
germ not only of man's body, as seen in the 
oldest vertebrate fossils, but of man's mind, 
and of all that mind does and can do both in- 
dividually and socially, have existed in the 
world's great life-tree from the start, — must 
have done so, according to evolution, — and 
have been continually unfolding themselves, if 
not at first as flower and fruit, yet long ago as 
shoot and stalk. There is hardly an experi- 
ment humanity is now trying in mechanics, art, 
government, labor, capital, education, sociol- 
ogy, and even ecclesiasticism, — some of them 
with its own children as the materials, — that 
nature has not already tried at least the prin- 
ciples of, over and over, in the cruder forms 
of matter, and with the cheaper materials of 
animal and vegetable structure. And, such be- 
ing the case, who cannot see that to study these, 
— which have succeeded and which have failed, 
and what have been the causes of their suc- 
cesses and failures, and what the philosophy 
is which lies behind them, — would save the 
statesman, the reformer and the citizen many 
a costly experiment on human beings, and 



96 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

would open the way for the intelligent choice 
of many an agency and path of progress now 
lying, it may be, right before their eyes, but 
which, as things are, they are groping for in 
utter blindness, or trampling down in utter 
contempt ? 

One of the great questions that is before our 
country to-day, and that every country has to 
meet, — one that involves millions of dollars 
and the principles, to some extent, on which is 
to turn the whole future of its civilization, and 
which in many respects is the most difficult that 
statesmanship has to deal with, — is what its 
people shall do in the way of arms and armor 
for their protection and defense. And it is a 
problem, too, that nature, not less impera- 
tively than nations, has had to deal with all 
through the past. War and the wager of bat- 
tle, weapons and the wounds of conflict, are 
not the accident and disease of her original 
economy, not a human lapse and folly, but a 
constituent element in her very system of 
things. The moment she set her creatures on 
earth, even in their lowest forms, exposed to 
the elements and compelled to get their own 
living, most of them, by preying on each other, 
it became necessary, if their lives were not at 
once to be extinguished, to provide them with 
some means on the one hand of assault, and on 
the other of defense, — a necessity which is 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 91 

bound up inseparably with those two great 
principles on which all organic evolution is 
based, the struggle for existence and the sur- 
vival of the fittest. Devices to meet it have 
played a part in her economy second only to 
those for alimentation itself; are a field in 
which she, too, as much as any statesman, has 
had to tax all her resources and lay under 
tribute all her skill. The rocks below the 
earth's surface are a vast gallery in which, 
while the muscles, stomachs and brains of her 
children have perished, the arms and armor 
with which they fought have for ages been 
preserved, as in our museums above its surface 
are the swords, shields and coats-of-mail that 
our human ancestors, now dust, wore to battle 
in their brave days of old. And the result of 
these long experiments as to what are fittest, 
and have helped their users to be fittest also, 
is not only of itself one of the most beautiful 
chapters in the Book of Evolution, but one 
that pours a great flood of practical wisdom 
on the problems of our time as to the true 
principles to be followed in securing national, 
social and even religious survival and su- 
premacy. 

The first effort of her Vulcan fingers was in 
the line of protective armor pure and simple, 
fhe encasement of animals and plants in a 



98 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

mere hard outside covering. It is what the ex- 
posure alone of their original protoplasm to 
water, sun and air, aided by the secretion of 
mineral matter on the surface, and intensified 
by the sui-vival and reproduction of the animals 
and plants which had it most, would tend nat- 
urally, in strict accordance with Darwin's laws, 
to produce ; and it is now seen to advantage in 
the sea-urchin and star-fish among radiates, 
in the oyster and clam among molluscs, in the 
turtle and alligator among vertebrates, in the 
eggs of birds, and, to some extent, in the skin 
and hair of all animals. 

It was a form, however, to which nature 
could not confine herself, especially in the 
animal kingdom. If live things were to live, 
either on each other or on vegetables, they ob- 
viously must have some means of breaking 
through each other's hard covers and getting 
at their inside meat. The means came to them 
in the form of cilia, tentacles, suckers, claws, 
mouths, horns, jaws, tails, tusks, teeth, begin- 
ning, perhaps, in such mere thread-like exten- 
sions of the inner protoplasm as are now seen 
in the rhizopods and culminating in the ap- 
paratus of such magnificent vertebrate car- 
nivora as the lion and the tiger. 

But such weapons alone, with only the old 
protoplasmic bodies to wield them, would not 
have been enough; would indeed have been of 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 99 

less value to them than even their old outside 
covering. To have them of any real use na- 
ture had to develop, along with them, bones, 
muscles, nerves, senses, brains ; and, in some 
of their owners, the habit and power of asso- 
ciation, — all that constitutes a highly organ- 
ized internal structure. These were organs 
and faculties which became, in their turn, a 
new species of armor still more interior; be- 
came at any rate what had the same use as 
armor, — the quickness of eye that could dis- 
cern the foe, the activity of limb that could fly 
to it, from it and around it, the shrewdness of 
mind that could observe its habits and select 
the best points for its attack, and the instinct 
of co-operation that could join forces in cop- 
ing with it, differing only in their fineness from 
the sharpness of the tooth and the strength of 
the claw. And thus were introduced the two 
great principles that nature has used in all her 
arming, and that have played and are still 
playing a most tremendous part in her 
economy, — their distinction being not exactly 
that of defensive and offensive weapons, for 
both, when need required, could be used de- 
fensively, but that the one had its chief value 
in its own outside strength, while the other de- 
pended for its efficacy on qualities connected 
with its possessor's inside development. 

Equipped from her arsenal with the varied 



100 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

arms and armor which embodied, some of them 
one of these principles almost exclusively, and 
some a mingling of the two, nature sent forth 
her myriad creatures into their great life-bat- 
tle, world-wide in its field, where the issue has 
been not only which of themselves, but which of 
their weapons and of the principles on which 
their weapons were made, would prove the fit- 
test, and best help their users to survive. Dur- 
ing the long geologic ages they were all, and 
especially the outward kinds, enormously de- 
veloped both in size and strength, and their 
underlying philosophy was tested in the 
severest way by contests alike with each other 
and with the world's equally ferocious natural 
elements. The orthoceras, a huge cephaloid 
mollusc of the lower Silurian rocks, had a 
thick, hard, cylindrical covering, twelve to 
eighteen feet long and at its base a foot in 
diameter. The dinichthys, a Devonian ganoid 
fish some thirty feet long, was protected about 
its head with a suit of massive articulated 
armor that a cannon-ball could hardly have 
crushed. Among the famous reptiles of the 
Jurassic and cretaceous ages, — the ichthyo- 
saur, megalosaur, mosasaur, iguanodon and 
others, — some were fifty, sixty, and a hundred 
feet long, plated over with thick scales for de- 
fense, and armed for attack with claws hooked 
back like sickles, with long projecting tusks 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 101 

that shut down by each other like clasped fin- 
gers, and with sharp, glistening saber-like 
teeth, sometimes four rows of them, and two 
hundred in number, — indeed " monstrous and 
prodigious things worse than fables yet have 
feigned." And the age of mammals had its 
mastodon with tusks twelve and fourteen feet 
long, its glyptodon with a solidified bony 
armor on its back nine feet across and weigh- 
ing nearly four thousand pounds, its megathe- 
rium with clawed feet a yard in length, and its 
machairodus, a tiger whose open mouth was an 
arsenal set with natural swords. 

How terrible must have been the contests of 
such monsters with each other, and the 
slaughter made by them on their weaker and 
less protected neighbors, — most truly " Na- 
ture red in tooth and claw with ravin " ! How 
different the scenes of their world from the 
peace and repose that Miltonic poets have loved 
to picture as the condition of the earth " be- 
fore the advent of man and sin " ! The sea was 
alive with animal frigates, the land with self- 
moving Krupp cannon, the sky with literally 
" flying artillery." The modern question be- 
tween steel plate and steel shot, tried of late by 
the Merrimac and the Monitor, was tried of old 
as a principle between ivory tooth and horny 
s/cale by many a megalosaur and mosasaur, 
carnivore and pachyderm, each increasing, as 



102 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

now, the force and size of the assailing weapon, 
as the other increased the thickness and 
strength of the defensive plate. The physical 
stuff of which a Nelson and a Napoleon, a Paul 
Jones and a Farragut, were afterwards made, 
cruised, perhaps, around the headlands of Eng- 
land, and marched, perhaps, across the wilds of 
Europe and America, ages before their day, as 
dinichthys and dinosaur, machairodus and 
megathere. Battles of Trafalgar and the 
Nile, of Marathon and Waterloo, deciding the 
fate of great animal kingdoms, were fought, to 
begin with, under far-off triassic and mesozoic 
skies. And whether or not Tennyson's lines are 
true of the future, — 

" And there rained a ghastly dew 
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the cen- 
tral blue," 

they have been true of the past, the " airy 
navies " being those of such great reptile birds 
as the pteranodon and pterodactyl, the latter 
with a wing-spread of twenty-five feet. 

What has been the result of this long, fero- 
cious war, as related to the various kinds of 
armor used by its combatants ? The records of 
the rocks conclusively answer. It has been the 
overwhelming of nearly all the races and orders 
that were provided with its massive outside 
varieties, and the survival and supremacy of 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 103 

those that have been equipped with its inner and 
finer forms. Orthoceras and dinichthys, meg- 
alosaur and megathere, ichthyosaur and iguan- 
cdon, monsters armed with shell and scale, tooth 
and claw, enormous and terrible, have all with- 
out exception gone down in the great life-bat- 
tle ; while those whose weapons were the finer 
skeleton, the keener sense, the quicker nerve, 
the larger brain and the stronger social in- 
stinct, faculties good for peace as well as war, 
— and some that apparently have had no out- 
ward fighting-apparatus at all, nothing but in- 
ner shrewdness and wisdom, — are the races that 
have been victorious, and survived. Even the 
armed ones whose descendants are still on the 
field, as the lion and the tiger, the eagle and the 
shark, have evidently held on by virtue of their 
quickened inner powers, rather than through 
their outward strength ; or else, as with the 
oyster and the clam by reason of their insig- 
nificance and unprogressiveness, rather than be- 
cause of their hardened shells. And man, the 
one that has progressed most of all, that has 
become the head of the animal kingdom and the 
lord and master of the earth, — he is the one 
that, outwardly, is the most unweaponed and 
defenseless of all ; the one whose claws are taper 
fingers, whose skin .every mosquito can punc- 
ture, and whose armor of thought has no size 
or weight whatever. 



io4j aspects of evolution 

What is the reason of this result, what the 
underlying causes why inward development 
should thus prove itself more effective in the 
struggle for life than outside strength? They 
are not hard to find. To begin with, the ani- 
mals that trusted to exterior arms and armor 
were less able to adapt themselves to the ever- 
changing conditions of the earth and of food 
supply, than those whose weapons were within. 
The very things which protected them against 
one set of elements made them often the more 
exposed to be overcome by another set, — as 
the heavy fur, so warm for winter, becomes an 
intolerable burden under the heats of summer. 
The endowments that were efficient against one 
set of enemies, by reason of their bulk, were in- 
efficient against another set by reason of their 
unwieldiness, — as the huge frigates, so power- 
ful against each other broadside to, are help- 
less against the lively little ram that rakes them 
turning round. And as the struggle went on 
between thicker plates on the one side and more 
formidable jaws, claws, teeth and limbs on the 
other, their weight and size became of them- 
selves in time their owners' worst foes, sinking 
them in morasses, stranding them on bars, ex- 
posing them to be overwhelmed with sudden 
floods, and at last bearing them down to earth 
and to extinction by simply their own hugeness. 
On the other hand, with some disadvantages, the 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 105 

development of the animal's inner powers and 
parts had, in all these directions, a correspond- 
ing gain. When nature invented her backbone, 
and put her limbs, flesh, senses, and so many of 
her soft and vulnerable parts, on its outside, it 
looked at first like a great military mistake, — 
like the building of a fort and the putting of its 
garrison outside of its walls rather than within 
their protection. But what a tremendous part 
this very arrangement of it has acted in all her 
subsequent operations. The mineral matter its 
possessors needed to carry about was, in pro- 
portion to their size, greatly reduced by it, 
alike in weight and bulk. How flexible it has 
proved in the line of adaptations, — ranging all 
the way from the fish in the sea to the bird in 
the air, from the snake that crawls to the man 
that walks, and from the uses of war to the 
needs of peace. What beauty and dignity it 
has gathered around it in man's kingly stature 
and in woman's queenly grace ; and how fitly, in 
the higher conflicts of civilization, it has become 
the symbol of the statesman's crowning at- 
tribute, — his " having backbone." So with 
each of nature's other steps in the same direc- 
tion. What was the sharp tooth as a help, 
either in defense or attack, as compared with 
the sharp eye? What the huge limb, clumsily 
brought down on its object, in contrast with 
the quickened nerve which, in the same time, 



106 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

with a smaller limb, could rain a score of blows 
against the selected weak parts of its victim? 
What the chance of the creature with the 
strongest claw and the widest range of wood 
and sea, in its contest with hunger and cold, as 
measured against one with the hand and mind 
to weave every fiber that grows into robes of 
warmth, turn every force of nature into weap- 
ons of war, and lay every land that blooms un- 
der contribution for food? If the inner de- 
velopment lost sometimes in its direct fitness for 
fighting, it made up for it a thousandfold by 
its larger fitness for peace ; and as peace, even 
in the wildest nature, is at least one of its 
normal conditions, — is the time, even among 
beasts, in which to prepare for war, — it is not 
strange that what was fitted in part for each of 
these states should have proved, as a whole, the 
fittest to survive. 

Beyond this, just in proportion as a live 
thing was protected by outward armor, either 
against the elements or against its foes, the 
stimulus for its interior development was taken 
away, the nourishing qualities of its food went 
to its outside parts, and the freedom of its cir- 
culatory system, always needed in the making 
of a highly differentiated organism, was sacri- 
ficed in the interest of its harder shell. It is 
not improbable that the starting-point of the 
whole divergence between the animal and vege- 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 107 

table kingdoms, now so broad, was that the 
original protistic protoplasm out of which they 
both came, identical in all other respects, was 
a little more solidified in the one case than in 
the other, as it still is in their germs, — that 
early outside protection being fatal to all ani- 
mal-life development. And when nature sur- 
rounds any creature at its birth with an encase- 
ment that is a guard without effort on its own 
part from all harm, as with the snail, oyster and 
clam, or develops its teeth, claws and bulk so 
enormously by inheritance that their mere dis- 
play protects it from all ordinary assaults, what 
inducement does the creature have for interior 
growth, and what sustenance have left for it 
even should the need arise? It is the animals 
whose very existence depends on the complete- 
ness and activity of their internal equipment, — 
on their quickness of motion, keenness of sense, 
and cunning of brain, rather than on their out- 
side covering, — it is these that will necessarily 
make the most of every variation in the direc- 
tion of such powers, using them more and more, 
and be the ones to mount up at last from monad 
into man. Historically, in the animal kingdom, 
it is out of the bodily weakest that have come 
the mentally strongest. Lacking talons, they 
have developed talents ; unable to throttle, they 
have learned to think. Danger has been their 
school ; difficulty their teacher ; and, instead of 



108 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

yielding to the arsenal of outward weapons ar- 
rayed against them, they have turned them into 
helpers, — sharpened their wits against the very 
teeth of tigers, made the ferocity of the hyena 
and bear contribute to their fineness of nerve 
and sense, and the portion of nature's goods 
that megalosaur and megathere consumed with 
riotous living in the making of brawn, they have 
used with economy in the making of brain. 

Then, too, the imperfection of their outward 
armor must have had a very important influence 
in driving the weak into that mightiest of all 
military arts, mightier than any tusk or claw 
or individual accouterment, — co-operative ef- 
fort. All animals even of the same species, or- 
ganized to prey on each other, would naturally 
be foes at first, and inclined to live apart. 
Outward shelter meant only the continuance o? 
this separation. What society could the oyster 
and the clam have with each other .^ What need 
of mutual assistance, the ichthyosaur and mega- 
losaur, fifty or a hundred feet long, and pano- 
plied all over with thick plates.? It was only 
the unprotected that would be under the neces- 
sity of overcoming their individual enmities and 
combining against their protected foes ; only the 
outwardly weak who would be apt learners of 
the lesson that union is strength. Once learned 
it became not only a mighty weapon of attack 
and defense, but the teacher of innumerable 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 109 

other things. The association it involved was 
a powerful stimulus to mind-development. 
Liking its benefits, they grew inevitably to like 
the benefit-givers, — that is, their associates. 
And thus, under the wonderful alchemy of evo- 
lution, out of the crucible of animal hate in this 
seething world of ours, stirred with tusk and 
claw, has come, as much as there is of it, the 
fine gold of brotherly love, the protective arms 
into which all weapons are at last to merge. 

As plants, in their relation to the world's 
great food-question, are necessarily the as- 
sailed rather than the assailants, being the prey 
of animals, but made to get their own living 
chiefly from unobjecting inorganic matter, their 
armor for the most part is naturally outward 
and protective rather than inward and offen- 
sive. It is what is found in the bark of trees, 
the rind of fruits, the shell of nuts, the beard of 
grains, the spines and thorns of many shrubs, 
and in the roughness and hardness of nearly all 
vegetation in its native state. And yet plants 
are not by any means entirely destitute of what 
may be called off*ensive arms, or wholly inca- 
pable, when assailed, of assailing in return. 
Species of them are found, here and there, like 
the sun-dew, the pitcher-plant, and the Venus 
fly-trap, which completely turn the tables on the 
animal kingdom, and, instead of being the eaten, 



110 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

are themselves the eaters, — catching their in- 
sect-victims with sticky fluids, spring-traps and 
imprisoning doors, the ingenuity of which the 
best patent, corner-grocery fly-destroyer might 
well emulate. Anybody who has ever tried to 
work himself imperiously through a tangled 
thicket, or to rob a blackberry-bush of its shin- 
ing progeny, or to climb a pear-tree for its 
juicy products, will be a not very incredulous 
sceptic as to the capacity of at least some plants 
for off^ensive warfare. When a forest has been 
cut down and a multitude of new shoots are 
springing up, and one of them gets a little the 
start of the others, no human being in the arena 
of politics or society or trade ever used his 
faculties more combatively, to elbow out and 
kick out all competitors, than such a vegetable 
upstart does its limbs and roots to shade out 
and starve out its vegetable brethren. The 
forest and the swamp have their leafy denizens 
that are weaponed as eff"ectively with deadly 
poisons, off*ensive odors and biting flavors as 
any in the animal kingdom that wear scales and 
furs, or in society that wear tongues and 
clothes. And the small boy who has assailed 
the green-apple tree has, in his doubling up 
from it during the night afterwards, an evi- 
dence which neither he nor his mother will dis- 
pute, that the assailed orchard is not inferior 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 111 

to the assailed pugilist in its skill to strike back 
at its antagonist's most sensitive parts. 

Tliere is the same difference, also, as to the 
fineness, beauty and organic rank of the weap- 
ons used in the vegetable kingdom, that is found 
in the animal world, and the same rivalry as to 
which will prove the most effective in its strug- 
gle for existence. Their coarsest and ugliest 
forms were the ones with which nature neces- 
sarily began. During the vast periods of 
paleontology the monsters of scale and claw 
were fully matched by those of leaf and bark. 
Trees were the grass on which fed iguanodon 
and dinocere; tree-tops the grain that was 
reaped by hadrosaur and dinothere. Reeds 
grew to be sticks of timber, and club-mosses to 
be forests in size. With flowers not yet come 
at all, and the true woods only in a limited de- 
gree, the world's plant-forces went forth for 
ages to their life-battles under the hueless cryp- 
togams as their banners and with the savage 
stigmaria and sigillaria trees as their lances and 
clubs, — fought them too, amid the thunder of 
volcanoes, the rising and falling of continents 
and the fierceness of tropic suns as we never 
know them now. And the coal-measures of to- 
day, their ancient battle-grounds, heaped thou- 
sands of feet thick with their dead remains, 
testify to the ferocity of their conflicts and to 



112 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

the grossness and strangeness of their weapons. 
The weeds of our own time, rough, tough, un- 
sightly and bitter, are looked upon as the spe- 
cial enemies of man's race, a part of the earth's 
curse for his primal sin, and as exercising their 
disagreeable qualities out of mere deviltry and 
love of mischief; and are warred against with 
all the unpitying sharpness of the farmer's hoe 
and the gardener's hate. But weeds to begin 
with were the special friends of agriculture and 
man, the vegetable aborigines of the land, and 
pioneers of civilization, and were armed thus 
with special reference to their work. When our 
modern earth was yet a wilderness built over 
the graves of its extinct geological vegetation, 
and incapable of nourishing any cultivated 
fruits, the " weeds " settled down on its great 
glacial furrows just plowed up, and began bat- 
tling with its crude, inorganic elements to work 
them over through their own veins into fruitful 
soils. Go out on the edge of any desert to-day, 
and 3^ou will see some of their tribe still engaged 
in their old pristine war, throwing out their ad- 
vanced guards and establishing their slender 
outposts each year a little further into the 
waste, too poor as yet to hoist over them the 
banner even of a flower, but winning what at 
last will wave with all springtime's streamers 
and autumn's signal-hues. And who does not 
see that their roughness, toughness and acrid- 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 113 

ness are the only possible weapons with which 
the}^ could have withstood the parching drouths, 
elemental starvations, and fierce animal hungers, 
of those elder days and outer realms, and so 
have won for their kingdom the first stages of 
its struggle for life? Who, in remembrance 
of what they have done, and as a foregleam of 
that philophyty into which mankind is some day 
to broaden out, will not forgive them the stained 
fingers and smarting palms with which, in gar- 
den and field, they resist being torn from what 
is so truly their own hard-won soil? 

Mingled, however, wdth these rough and 
repellent weapons of the vegetable world, its 
finer qualities of color, form and flavor have 
gradually come in, — flowers on bush and tree, 
arching limbs and drooping boughs out in the 
stately woods, sweet and nourishing pulps in 
and around the seeds, and fragrant odors 
wafted on the evening gale ; — these, moreover, 
not merely as ornaments to themselves or as 
foods for other creatures, but as forces, also, 
w^hich primarily they all are, in their ow^n strug- 
gle for life, — arms and armor in the same way 
as are the senses and the higher faculties that 
have played such an important part in the bat- 
tles of the animal kingdom. 

With the finer qualities themselves, an in- 
genuity and skill have also been developed in 
their use and application, which seem sometimes 



114 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

to be almost human. Not a few of the arts and 
devices of mimicry, that are so wonderful 
among animals, have their counterparts in 
plants. How ihej huddle together in glorious 
companionship for defense against heat and 
cold. With what architectural wisdom they 
send out their roots and build up and balance 
their branches so as to hold and fortify their 
positions against gravity and wind. With 
what shrewdness, while some of them hide from 
animals and men, others find their protection 
by following in their steps. And when do- 
mesticated and hedged in with fences, and de- 
fended with hoes, how winningly for more of 
such armor, do they, as flowers, put on their 
brightest colors, and as fruits clothe themselves 
in their richest pulps. 

Especially do their wisdom and care, not to 
say love, come out in what they do for their 
young. All plants, the same as all animals, 
seem to reach the best they are capable of in 
their position as parents, — sonship, being ap- 
parently the axil out of which branches all good, 
vegetable, animal, human, and, if Christianity 
be true, even divine. Unable to protect their 
fruit with claws and wings, like beasts and 
birds they do so, while it is immature, by making 
its color green, like that of their leaves, so as to 
hide it from view, and its taste sour and bitter, 
so that no ordinary creature would think of 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 115 

putting it into its stomach. But when it is 
ripe, and there is need of its being scattered 
away from its parent stalk to find room and 
warmth for its own further growth, they put 
on it, in direct contrast with their leaves, all the 
bright colors of the cherry, berry, apple, peach 
and pear, so as to attract the attention of pass- 
ers-by, and make its outside luscious and sweet 
as an inducement for them to eat of it and carry 
it off, — at the same time Avrapping its inside 
germ, and that germ's own special nutriment, 
in an armor which is proof against the digestive 
assaults of even a wild animal's stomach. How 
much is all this like the human mother keeping 
her darling boy inconspicuous at home during 
the first years of his life, but who, when the 
time comes for sending him out into the world 
to get his own living, takes off his old home- 
spun, dresses him up in his best clothes, and 
puts a little money in his pocket, the sinews of 
war with which he is to pay his way to a new 
home and begin his battle of life, and beneath 
this, right around his heart, the armor of a 
Bible, or of principles and good advice, to keep 
him in his inexperience from being at once the 
world's prey. Fruits like those of the hickory- 
tree, whose sweetness is wholly in their meat, 
are provided with a bitter outside covering, 
which, instead of growing bright and eatable 
with their ripening, simply opens, when, in the 



116 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

frosty autumn they drop from their parent 
tree, exposing a white inside shell very conspic- 
uous for boys and squirrels to see and gather, 
but at the same time a veritable fort, built with 
all manner of intricate casements, salient an- 
gles, and retreating walls, that only nut- 
crackers and the sharpest teeth can storm and 
break through. The cocoa-tree, having a large 
heavy nut whose hard shell would be liable to 
crack open in falling from its high limbs to the 
ground, wraps it up beforehand in a soft 
cushion-like matting, as its defense against the 
hard earth. And more ingenious still, the 
cashew-nut, growing in tropical climates and 
much loved by monkeys, has in its immediate 
covering a pungent, acrid acid, which, touched, 
burns not only their tongues but also even their 
paws, so that not even a hungry monkey, after 
one experience with its armor, can be tempted 
to fool with it again ; but, as an allurement to 
secure their aid in its dispersion, it has at the 
end of its stalk, and independent of the nut 
itself, a most delicious edible tuber, which they 
can have and do have at the cost only of giving 
the real fruit a chance to grow, — a contrivance 
equal to that of the old lady who presented the 
boy, whose integrity she was not quite ready 
to trust, with a roll of candy for carrjang her 
package of sweet cakes safe to a neighbor, but 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 117 

at the same time wrote on its cover, " Wallop 
him well if you find it opened." 

What is the result of nature's experiment 
here as to the two ways of arming her crea- 
tures? As told in the broad pages of paleon- 
tology, it is the same as in her animal kingdom, 
— the gradual evolution of its inner and finer 
forms out of and over those which are outward 
and coarse ; the weapons of sweetness, beauty, 
grace and use, above those of hardness, huge- 
ness, acrid juices, and. outside strength. The 
flowering plants have more and more come to 
the front, — the white lily and the fragrant 
rose left far behind, in their struggle for exist- 
ence, the old hueless, odorless cryptogams. 
The grains, with their great heads, have grown 
up over the graves of the gymnosperms, with 
their great bodies. The apple-trees, the pear- 
trees, and the peach-trees, with their rich fruit, 
have elbowed out the seal-tree and the scale-tree 
with their tough skins. And the graceful elm 
towering up over the cottage roof, looks down 
the chimney out of v/hich curls up to it, as if 
in homage, the smoke of the carboniferous pale- 
oxon and the old hirsute neuropteris. It is a 
struggle, to be sure, that is not yet over, a war 
whose wilder participants are very far yet from 
being all subdued. But the master forces, and 
the qualities and reasons which make them mas- 



118 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

ters, are plainly to be seen. The industrial age 
of vegetation has come in. The work of doing 
something for others has been found even 
among trees and shrubs a mightier weapon 
than any art of mere individual defense. 
Plants have learned, whole species of them, 
that it is cheaper to hire other tribes to wage 
their wars than it is to train up themselves to 
do it ; learned that vegetable gold, heaped up in 
the orchard and the field, will turn the edge of 
vegetable iron hammered out in the jungle and 
the fen. The honey that attracts the insect- 
tribes has done for the flowering shrub, in its 
struggle for existence, what no hardness, driv- 
ing them away, ever did ; and the luscious out- 
side of the fruit which feeds the birds has se- 
cured them against foes more effectually than 
any bitter rind that repelled them had the power 
to do. What does the cherry-tree want of a 
gun of its own, when it has made it for the in- 
terest of the small boy to sit patiently with one 
all day keeping off the too eager robins, by 
giving him at night a quart or two of the red 
balls that it spends its own energies in ripening 
by the thousand? What need does the wheat- 
field have of building fences against encroach- 
ing cattle, when it has allied itself with almost 
omnipotent corporations to surround its millions 
of acres with barbed wires, and secured dignified 
legislatures to build insurmountable legal posts 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 119 

to hold them up ! How vain is it for the potato 
to distill a poison of its own against bugs, when 
out of its rich tubers it can pay patient human 
fingers to feed them day after day with im- 
ported Paris-green? And how smilingly the 
serried ranks of the corn-field can straighten up 
their own spines and use their green blades only 
to parry the sunshine, while the farmer and his 
boy bend their aching backs and ply their sharp 
hoes at their roots to drive away and put to 
death, as no skill in themselves could, their thou- 
sand weed-foes? 

Ascending now into the kingdom of man him- 
self, the evolution of what has played such an 
important part in the animal and vegetable 
wo-rlds has certainly not been less prominent or 
less interesting in that of their head, and in his 
struggle for life. " Arma virumque cano,^^ — 
not unnaturally did the old Latin poet put the 
two together as themes to be unitedly sung ; the 
arma perhaps logically first, as something with- 
out which man, surrounded with the savage wild, 
and so weak in himself, never could have been 
man. His earliest weapons may indeed have 
been the nature-given ones that he had in his 
brute-estate, fists, nails and teeth, — the ones 
that, in all emergencies, he falls back upon still, 
— mingled perhaps with the bare sticks and 
stones that he picked up in the woods, — 



120 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

" Arma antiqua manus, ungues, dentesque fuere 
Et lapides et item silvarum fragmina, rami** 

as wise Lucretius has it. But when, as our 
great anthropoid ancestor, he came down out of 
his tree-life, he had, in his fingers able to grasp 
a club, — the fingers which his forelimbs, in 
grasping the tree, had developed into, — some- 
thing far better with which to meet his foes than 
the claws with which he went up into it ; and he 
has not been slow to use his new powers. From 
grasping clubs and stones he has gone on to 
grasping repeating-rifles and dynamite-shells. 
There is no chapter of human progress more in- 
teresting and impressive than that of its arms- 
making, unless it be that of its arms-using. All 
the resources of art, all the illuminations of 
science, have for ages been brought to bear upon 
it. Some of the most honored names of antiq- 
uity, though forgotten now, as those of Luno, 
Galen, and Andrea Ferrara, were the names of 
sword-makers and armorers. It was an occupa- 
tion not considered unworthy of an Olympian 
god; and one of the most brilliant pages of 
Homer is the description of a shield, as one of 
the most graphic in Walter Scott is that of a 
sword. Kings sat at its followers' feet; the 
fate of empires turned on their skill ; civilization 
in its onward march kept time with the rise and 
fall of their hammers. And, though stained 



EVOLUTION AND WAR Ul 

with blood and smoke and hate, their products 
have been plumed also with some of the noblest 
deeds of chivalry, honor, courage, self-sacrifice 
and manly devotion that human nature has ever 
reached. 

But amid all their multiplied devices as to 
form and mechanism, the two methods, the two 
principles which ran so conspicuously through 
the animal and vegetable kingdoms, have been 
equally kept up in that of man, — on the one 
side a stronger outside covering, whose efficacy 
was chiefly in itself, as the thick garment, the 
buU's-hide buckler, the brazen shield, the visored 
helmet, the plated greaves, the glittering coat- 
of-mail, the massive fort, the turreted monitor, 
and the steel-clad ship ; and on the other, some- 
thing which involved, more directly, inward 
skill and power, as the club, the spear, the sword, 
the cross-bow, the catapult, the matchlock-gun, 
the rifle, the cannon, the ram, the torpedo, and 
behind them all the cunning, the courage and 
the union instinct of man himself. And in the 
struggle between them here, the same as among 
the plants and the brutes, the result has been 
the supremacy of the inward over the outward, 
and a progress ever more towards their finer and 
more inward forms as the ones on which at last 
wholly to rely. The old Bible story of Goliath 
and David, — the one a giant six cubits high, 
armed with a coat-of-mail of " five thousand 



m ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

shekels in weight," and a spear " like a weaver's 
beam," the other a ruddy youth armed only with 
a sling and five small stones out of the brook, 
and his own skill, — has been the story of the 
ages. The barbaric nations have always re- 
lied most on outward defenses, the civilized 
ones on those that require inward skill; and 
victory the world over has sided with the skill. 
The weapons with which the Roman soldier 
carved his way to universal empire against all 
the shields, greaves, breast-plates and forts 
of his foe, were the short two-edged broad- 
sword, nineteen inches long, and the famous 
" pilum," four feet in length, — himself pro- 
tected only by his own stout heart and a very 
light defensive armor. The slender spears of 
the ancient Greek infantry, twenty-four feet 
in length, and the lances at a later day of the 
old feudal cavalry, projecting ten feet beyond 
their horses' heads, again and again bore down 
in battle all the massive protective defenses 
that their opponents were panoplied with. 
The best steel-plate armor of the middle ages, 
forged with marvelous skill, and completely 
covering the person, was no match for the ar- 
rows, five feet long, of the English yeoman, 
hitting the target every time an eighth of a 
mile off, and on the victorious fields of Crecy, 
Poitiers and Agincourt shooting down their 
mailed opponents at the distance of two hun- 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 123 

dred yards " as readily as if they were naked 
men." If now and then the strength of the 
armor caught up with that of the arms, as at a 
battle in Italy during the latter part of the 
15th century, where they were so nearly 
matched that the two opposing armies fought 
ferociously for seven hours without having a 
man killed or wounded on either side, it was 
only at the very next battle to have a new as- 
sailing weapon introduced to maintain the old 
supremacy, — as, in this case, musketry at the 
battle of Pavia, before which all the gorgeous 
panoply of chivalry went down as completely 
as the fields of bearded grain before the driving 
summer hail. Waterloo was the last great 
fight in which bodily armor was used, 
Napoleon's cavalry wearing it, and up to that 
time with some success ; but in the charges 
there made, his iron-sheathed cuirassiers went 
down like rows of pins before the quick-moving 
English horse dashing in upon them with only 
naked swords and naked hands. The contest 
now is between massive forts and steel-clad 
ships, with ever thicker and thicker plates, on 
the one side, and mathematically-aimed mortars 
and steel-wrought rams and cannon, and pro- 
jectiles themselves shot-loaded, — cannon fired 
from cannon, — with ever more and more size 
and force, on the other. But with mortars 
dropping shells from above at the rate of one 



124i ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

a minute into forts three or Tour miles away, 
and torpedo-boats creeping under plated 
frigates from below as readily as eels under a 
plank, and projectiles driven with smokeless 
powder through five inches of steel backed with 
fifteen of oak as easily as a boy's teeth pass 
through slices of bread and butter, and dyna- 
mite-guns throwing from the shore at marks 
two miles off five-hundred-pound explosive- 
bombs that tear up the heart of old ocean it- 
self for a hundred yards around, who can doubt 
the result? 

It is a result, moreover, in all these cases, 
which has not stopped with teaching and help- 
ing on the superiority and evolution of an 
ever finer and finer weapon alone. It has 
taught and carried with it also the superiority 
and evolution, behind the weapon, of an ever 
finer and finer man. It has done it, first of all, 
in the artisan who makes the weapon. Rifles 
that shoot sixty balls a minute, and cannon 
that send hundred-pound shells through twenty 
inches of solid oak and steel, do not grow nat- 
urally, like teeth and nails, out of the soldier's 
own body. They have to be invented and 
wrought out by a man back of the soldier. 
They involve, in their maker, art and science, 
skill of hand and skill of brain, — immense 
amounts of them. And what is more, they in- 
volve in him honesty and truth. There is 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 125 

nothing which detects cheap workmanship and 
base alloys quicker than the acid of war. We 
tolerated shoddy in our shops, in our homes, 
in our churches, easily enough while peace 
reigned on our soil ; but when it came to send- 
ing it to our soldiers on battle-fields, America's 
outcry of rage brought its dealers to a very 
sudden halt. Rotten timbers have small chance 
of passing the inspection-eyes that fifty-ton 
broadsides of iron direct against them. And 
when you touch off dynamite-guns, that exert a 
pressure of a hundred tons to the square inch, 
varnish and putty and the men who make them 
are apt to fly very high and very far, leaving 
back of the soldier only solid steel and solid 
workmen. Equally, too, finer armor has 
evolved, in the soldier himself, an ever finer and 
finer man. It is no longer, as it once was, phys- 
ical strength alone that counts in war; no 
longer the more a brute the more a soldier. 
Gunpowder made bodies equal, and began the 
process of having battles turn on brains. It is 
a process that has never stopped. With rifles 
like those now made, as delicate in their ma- 
chinery as chronometers, and with cannon that 
have to be aimed at foes as mathematically as 
telescopes at stars, it is obviously impossible 
to trust clod-hoppers with their use. New 
weapons involve precisely the same necessity 
for a more highly organized soldier that new 



1^6 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

teeth and new claws did of old for a more 
highly organized animal. It is not the fighter 
in the mass, as it was in ancient Greece and 
Rome, but the fighter in the man, that makes 
an army's strength. With each more intricate 
arm more responsibility rests on the individual 
soldier, not on his captain or his corps, for its 
efficiency; the more need, therefore, there is of 
his individual training. Bayonets have had to 
learn not only how to thrust but how to think. 
Battle-fields, which hitherto have been supposed 
to necessitate the most absolute despotism in 
command, and to be the last places where per- 
sonal liberty could be allowed, are having the 
way opened through their new weapons to taste 
for themselves what they have won so long for 
peace. And the armor which began with a 
sharp animal spine is mounting up step by 
step to that quality in the soldier's soul which 
can say, in all its sharpness, the grand Avord I. 

It is not only individuals and brute races, 
however, but tribes and nations also, that use 
arms and are combatants in the struggle for 
existence ; and as such, they are going through 
the same experiments as to the best ways and 
means of doing it that animals and individuals 
have tried, only on a larger scale. Originally 
a tribe's entire corporate body was a soldier 
going out to battle as one man. Every male 



BVOLUTION AND WAR 1^7 

member of it was accustomed to the use of 
arms alike in war and the chase. Fighting was 
considered to be the only employment worthy of 
a man ; and honor and leadership and wives, and 
the best of everything, waited on his cour- 
age and success. But gradually nations found 
that, to fight well, something more was needed 
than brute courage and the rude weapons that 
each man could make for himself. Food was 
needed, and finer weapons, and resources to fall 
back upon when the struggle was long, the 
tribes Avhich had the most of these being the 
ones that finally survived. And so a differenti- 
ation took place, the inevitable process in all 
evolution, — some of the members devoting 
themselves exclusively to the raising of food 
and clothing, and others to the manufacture of 
arms, and with these, gradually, to all the 
employments needed for social nourishment, 
while a third part were trained specifically as 
soldiers. Thus inside the nation were started 
the soft industrial arts, the fluid, nutritive, 
growing, organizable parts of the body, and, 
on its outside, the hard military protective 
shell, — precisely the same state of things that 
existed in the earliest forms of individual life. 
And along these two lines, away up into the 
civilization of to-day, has been all national de- 
velopment, — these as methods of protection 
distinguishing countries in precisely the same 



128 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

way that they do animals and plants. On the 
one hand is outward military encasement, as 
with all the great nations of Europe, — orthoc- 
erates and glyptodons that stretch over vast 
territories ; megalosaurs and machairoduses 
whose dimensions are those of States. Forts 
and frigates are their shells and scales ; long 
rows of sharp sabers and glittering bayonets 
their teeth; vast armies their ponderous jaws; 
Krupp-cannon and Gatling-guns their talons 
and claws, and 

" The bursting shelly the gateway rent asunder, 
The rolling musketry^ the clashing blade, 
And ever and anon in tones of thunder 
The diapason of the cannonade/* 

the wild-beast cries with which they leap upon 
their foe. On the other hand is interior de- 
velopment, as, in some degree, with our own 
land, — the skeleton of a better social organi- 
zation for the uniting and upholding of the 
body as a whole, the nerves and arteries of 
telegraphs and railroads for the quicker and 
closer communication of part with part, the 
muscles and ligaments of industry and busi- 
ness for the obtaining of better nourishment, 
and the eyes, ears and brain of more schools, 
more arts and sciences and more churches, for 
the gathering of knowledge and the growth of 
mind. 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 129 

Which of these methods is it the part of true 
statesmanship to emphasize and use? There is 
a tendency even in our own land to fall back 
on the method of outward force. We get 
alarmed ever and anon at what we call our de- 
fenseless condition, — at our small army, our 
rotting gun-boats, and our dilapidated forts. 
We picture to ourselves what a terrible thing 
it would be if some little country with a big 
cannon should declare war against us ; and fol- 
low with boyish pride the excursions of our 
costly show-frigates into ports where our pro- 
tective commercial policy has driven from the 
seas every flag of ours needing protection. 
And this very winter the proposition is before 
our Congress to vote the nation's money by the 
score of millions for the building of a steel- 
clad navy that shall match those of the old 
world. 

But if there is anything to be learned from 
the long experience of the mighty past, alike 
animal and human, is not the question's true 
answer largely, if not entirely, the other way, 
— an answer that tells us to go on as we have 
in part begun, and as the real genius of our 
country prompts, letting Germany, Russia and 
France follow the lead of the dinichthys and 
the megalosaur in heaping up outward armor, 
while we seek to develop as the man-nation of 
the earth by unfolding from within? It is, 



ISO ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

indeed, true that the man-animal of the earth 
has been a fighter, — one of the worst ; and that 
all the world's great historic nations have been 
fighters, and terrible ones, too ; but the point to 
be remembered is that they have got their best 
means of fighting, got the real qualities which 
enabled them to come off victors in their fights, 
by cultivating the arts of peace rather than 
those of war. " A nation of shop-keepers ! " 
exclaimed Napoleon, contemptuously, as he 
looked across the English Channel; but one 
day, in his dealings with the shop-keepers, he 
found, very uncomfortably, that among their 
wares they had a Waterloo. How was it in the 
recent struggle on our own soil between the 
North and the South.? The South was the 
military part of the nation. It had the most 
accomplished generals. Its children had been 
trained from their youth up in the use of arms ; 
and in courage and in direct fighting qualities 
it certainly was not inferior to the North. 
But the North had the freedom, the wealth, the 
inventive genius, the mental training, the 
higher interior development, — all those quali- 
ties which are the outgrowth of peace. It 
called them at once into action ; — where it 
wanted a new rifle, new war-ship, new sanitary 
device, called on its rear guard, back of all 
other rear guards, to invent it. The rear 
guard never failed to do so ; and the result was 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 131 

just as certain with the first gun at Sumter, 
as with the last at Appomattox Court House, — 
was wrought out by the school-mistress and 
the aproned mechanic quite as largely as by the 
brave general and the bannered soldier. It has 
been said that the nations which shorten their 
swords lengthen their borders, — historically a 
fact. But, ultimating the same principle, we 
are now learning that the nations which go still 
further, and shorten their swords into noth- 
ing at all, lengthen their borders still more, — 
and at the same time lengthen their lives. 
Wherein is the wisdom of voting millions of 
dollars for forts and frigates which in a few 
years will be as passe as cross-bows and coats- 
of-mail, and when the genius that, by its other, 
finer inventions, is to make them so, is growing 
of itself in our laboratories and workshops? 
It is the people hereafter who can raise Erics- 
sons, not Napoleons, send to the field the best 
manhood, not the biggest mortars, boast the 
completest social, not soldierly organization, 
that can laugh at their foes. " Damn the tor- 
pedoes ! " shouted the grim old naval hero of 
our Civil War, as he took his unarmored flag- 
ship into the hottest hell of the fight at Mobile 
Bay; and well the old Hartford might despise 
them, for within its wooden walls were iron-clad 
hearts, and above it waved Liberty's banner, 
and it was sheathed all over with a cause that 



132 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

gunpowder could as little blow up as it could 
omnipotence itself. And no matter though 
every sea were to be filled with explosives, and 
every bay with dynamite, let America carry 
stalwart manhood on her decks, and unfettered 
liberty at her masthead, and the sheathing of 
a righteous cause at her prow, and, if need de- 
mand, she can go into the hottest hell of the 
world's battle, exclaiming again, with the 
sacred profanity of her dear old Farragut, 
" Damn the torpedoes ! " 

Of course this does not mean that the coun- 
try should rush all at once from its policy in 
the past over to the opposite extreme ; does not 
mean that in the interests of peace it should 
wipe out the army and navy and beat into plow- 
shares the swords it now has, or that it should 
abate in any degree its reverence for the brave 
soldiers on its own soil, and all through the 
ages, who by their use have filled history with 
heroisms and the world with salvations. For 
peace, when it comes, will be the result of evo- 
lution, not manufacture ; and evolution here, 
as everywhere else, must have the root and 
stalk of the past on which and from which to 
unfold ; and to cut down the armor-part of the 
past would be to cut down the very tree on 
which, as things look, its flower at last is to 
bloom. But it does mean that we should rec- 
ognize what has been the bent and strain of 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 133 

nature in all her kingdoms and all her ages, 
and ourselves work with her in the same direc- 
tion. It does mean that, without destroying 
what now is on her armor-tree, we should join 
with her, so far as we do anything, in cultivat- 
ing its finer industrial branches, as good alike 
for peace or war, — not spend our millions in 
merely crowding it with bigger ones of the old 
type that will be of value for neither state. 

It is in this way, by a simple and natural un- 
folding from the past, not cutting loose from 
it or sticking to it, that will come the supreme 
stage in the evolution of arms and armor, — 
that in which wars will be waged with no guns, 
no forts, no ships, no outward explosives at all ; 
with no need, therefore, even of the arts that 
made them, — but with missiles only that are 
forged out of mind. So far as fighting of 
some kind is concerned it would indeed be a 
fool's security for humanity to suppose that its 
days are over, and that peace in the sense of 
harmony is close at hand. Problems are be- 
fore it to-day more perplexing than any that 
the past has ever known; passions at work in 
it fiercer than ever fired hearts in the jungle 
with rage ; interests at stake with it more con- 
flicting than any that a Marathon or Waterloo 
decided, — and there is no possibility of settling 
them without contests. It is their very great- 
ness and intricacy, however, that are going to 



134 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

make it all the more a matter not of sentimental 
choice but of military necessity, to meet them 
with weapons of a corresponding substance and 
temper. It is a process that has already be- 
gun, a new bud that, like all buds, is springing 
directly from the axil of the old war-tree. The 
best general, even now, is not he who fights the 
most battles with guns, but he who so manoeu- 
vers his army as to win victories with the few- 
est actual conflicts ; not he who, when a battle 
comes, takes part himself in the deadly charge, 
but he who sits quietly in his tent with a map 
before him, directing charges with a pencil's 
point, and neither sees nor sheds personally a 
drop of blood. Literature in all ages has had 
its words that were half-battles ; eloquence its 
vibrations of air that have shaken the world 
wider than parks of artillery ; religion its love- 
whispers that neither Greek phalanx nor Roman 
legion could withstand, and before which em- 
pires have tumbled down as readily as savages 
before canister and grape. Paws and claws, if 
not yet extinct, have climbed up from the feet 
into the forehead, and from weapons that 
scratch and tear into weapons that think and 
plan. It is brains to-day, behind the cannon, 
that are the world's real battle-fields ; ideas 
that are battering down strongholds which 
shot and shell, armored ship and gaping mortar 
have knocked at in vain ; ink that is solving 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 135 

questions of State that blood has only con- 
fused. And the process is bound to go on, till 
nations shall wage all their wars with logic and 
reason, diplomacy everywhere take the place of 
generalship, battles with powder and armies be 
as vulgar as those with teeth and fists are to- 
day, and civilized countries as little think of 
going about the world armed with- forts, and 
showing off frigates, as civilized individuals do 
now of going about society with bowie-knives 
stuck in their belts and revolvers gleaming 
from their pockets. And this is what every 
citizen can help along; is what every soldier 
should rejoice in, as he does now in the intro- 
duction of every finer and more effective 
weapon; is what the great poet of England, 
who sang so grandly the Charge of the Light 
Brigade, has also sung as the charge of all 
the ages, — 

" Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die." 

With it will come the world's real struggle 
to see which are its fittest nations to survive; 
a war more thrilling and with more chance for 
real heroism, generalship, and glory, than any 
ever waged with outer weapons and garments 
rolled in blood ; and in it the great military na- 
tions of Europe are preparing to fail, through 
precisely the same causes that overthrew the 



136 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

monsters of the geologic ages and that have 
meant failure in all time. Their vitality and 
food-substance are going too largely to the 
outside shell. Internal social organization is 
being neglected. They are not keeping up with 
the world's changing intellectual climate. 
And, continually rivaling each other in the 
size and strength of their armaments, they will 
drop down at last in the fight like the iguan- 
odon and glyptodon, overcome simply by their 
own enormous weight, leaving the great scien- 
tific, industrial and thought-using man-nations 
to examine their bones, organize over them 
the new civilization, in which " the war-drum 
throbs no longer," and hold the future. 

" Dream not that helm and harness 
Are signs of valor true: 
Peace hath higher tests of manhood 
Than battle ever knew. 

" Henceforth to Labor's chivalry 
Be knightly honors paid; 
For nobler than the sword's shall be 
The sickle's accolade." 

The lesson, however, does not stop with 
statesmanship. Religion is a field where pre- 
cisely the same principle is at issue. What are 
creeds, forms and great ecclesiastical systems 
but the outward armor in which men have 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 1^7 

sought to protect the inward spirit of religion? 
What are many of the churches and denomina- 
tions of the past but monsters of the theologic 
ages, rivaling those of geology in their fierce- 
ness? What the rack, the stake, the thumb- 
screw, the inquisition, and, later, all the awful 
imagery of eternal suffering, but the teeth and 
claws and jaws of the old brute-world reappear- 
ing on earth in subtler and sharper forms? 
Their use has no doubt been honest and nat- 
ural; their hardness and cruelty have been 
thought a necessary means of defending and 
perpetuating their inside truth. But how fu- 
tile they have been ! How many of the old 
dogmas are now as dead as the old brutes ! 
How certain are all the institutions and all the 
churches, whose trust is in any outward letter 
or outward form, sooner or later also to go ! 
And for the same reason, — the use of their 
vitality in the wrong direction; the impossi- 
bility of anything thus hardened to adjust 
itself to the world's ever-changing spiritual 
climate, and the pressure at last on their be- 
lievers, under the effort to make them ever 
stronger and stronger against their foes, of 
their own dead weight. On the other hand 
Christianity itself lives, the great spirit of all 
religion lives, because an element within it has 
always acted on the other principle, — refused 
from the start, as with Jesus, to encase itself 



138 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

in any words or forms, used its divine food for 
inward growth, adapted itself to the world's 
progress, and relied, when assailed, for its real 
defense, on the inner weapons of reason, spirit- 
ual insight and the power of truth. When re- 
ligion first started, ages since, from form to 
faith, from outward authority to inward in- 
sight, and from one vast body to a multitude of 
little sects, it did indeed seem, from the ec- 
clesiastical standpoint, as great a mistake as 
when the animal kingdom branched off from a 
shell to a back-bone, and from a megalosaur 
to a microlestes. But the wisdom which has 
been vindicated of her children in the kingdom 
of animals will just as surely be vindicated of 
them in that of spirit. And if the friends of 
religion want to defend it most effectively of 
all, is it not plainly along the line of its in- 
terior development, rather than along that of 
building it into creeds and fortifying it with 
logic, that their work should be done? 
" Than tyrant's law or bigot's ban 

More mighty is the simplest word, 
The free heart of an honest man 

Than crosier or the sword." 

Going now a step further, does not the same 
principle hold good with regard to morals, 
right, reform, and that greatest of all organ- 
isms, society itself.? These things are precious 
beyond all price, have grown up to their pres- 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 139 

ent condition through enormous toil and suffer- 
ing, — would mean, in their loss, what never, 
perhaps, could be restored ; and so it is not 
strange that men should seek to protect and 
promote them with rigid precepts, with stern 
prohibitory laws, with great bodies of police 
and with all the weapons of courts, jails, scaf- 
folds and penal legislation. It may indeed be 
impossible yet to abolish such things altogether, 
as the safeguards of societ}^ Nevertheless, 
even while using them, must it not be acknowl- 
edged that they belong to the triassic and 
mesozoic rather than to human social states ; 
are nature's methods in the oyster and the 
clam, the lobster, and the lion, rather than in 
the man ; are the use for defense, of shell and 
scale, tooth and claw, instead of sense and soul? 
Whatever the good they do, their defects are 
the same as have been found in all outside arms 
and armor, from the brutes up. The moral 
vitality, alike of the individual and of society, 
goes into their production and support, away 
from inward growth. The stronger and bet- 
ter they are made for any one period and con- 
dition of things, the less easy it is to adjust 
them to the world's changes, and the less fit 
they are for those which follow. What is the 
effort to put down increasing crime by increas- 
ing laws, an experiment that every unfolding 
social state goes through, but a renewal of the 



140 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

old contest between stronger scale and stronger 
claw, stouter iron-plate and stouter gun? It 
is a contest sure to result at last in a dead 
weight of legislation, too large for society to 
carry. Crime in it, as the assailing force, will 
continually get ahead, the same as in the strug- 
gle between tooth and scale in geology, be- 
tween thieving and law in England a century 
ago, and between landlord-legislation and ten- 
antry-violence in Ireland to-day. And even 
were such efforts successful, — were laws to be 
made so wise, and a police-force established for 
their enforcement so strong as to suppress 
absolutely, for the time being, all vice and all 
crime, — how inevitably would they lead to a 
reliance on these agencies alone, and to a relax- 
ation of inward culture that in the end would 
stop growth and turn society back towards its 
mollusc-state. Take the use of prohibitory 
laws in behalf of temperance, — whatever their 
value, a real value in some respects, it must 
be confessed that just in proportion as they 
are enforced, the other and finer agencies of 
the cause, which should act on the drunkard's 
moral nature to strengthen that, are liable to 
be dropped, leaving him, while safe from drink 
simply because he cannot get it, a prey all the 
more to other, worse vices, whose means of 
indulgence no laws can stamp out. What chil- 
dren are the weakest and surest to fall when 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 141 

they grow up and go out into the temptations 
and trials of actual life? Those, notedly, who 
have been sheltered most carefully by home 
walls and parental care from all contact with 
evil, rather than those who have been strength- 
ened inwardly, it may be in the very midst of 
temptation, to take care of themselves. What 
is the source of all Phariseeism, all hypocrisy, 
all obedience to the letter and not the spirit of 
right, — social states worse sometimes than 
open vice? It is the attempt to make people 
righteous by precepts rather than by princi- 
ples ; to protect virtue by an armor of rigid 
rules instead of by trusting to its own larger 
development ; so that wisely did the old Apostle 
to the Gentiles exclaim : " The law worketh 
wrath." The truth is, there is only one sure 
way of arming either society or the soul against 
their foes, — the way taught by all the ages, 
from those of geology up, — that of completer 
inward equipment, putting nature's moral line 
into the back-bone of principle, rather than 
into the shell of statute-books ; building more 
school-houses and more reformatories in the 
place of more scaffolds and more jails ; develop- 
ing more eyes and ears with which to see and 
hear the right, rather than more teeth and 
claws with which to put down the wrong, and 
organizing not so much a better police as a 
better people. It is this which is the funda- 



14^ ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

mental idea of Christianity ; this, what it means 
by its doctrine of faith as opposed to law ; this, 
that it has come back to in all its great refor- 
mations, from that of Luther down ; this, the 
goal at which it joins hands with science; this, 
very singularly, that is the real meaning to-day. 
of a word almost too hateful for utterance, — 
the blossom in society of religion's most 
cherished teaching and the outcome in morals 
of nature's divinest struggle for life. Its 
shortest expression, " Right its own best 
weapon," is a Damascus-blade that what battle- 
fires have tempered and battle-blows hammered 
out ! Not poetry alone, is it, but sober fact, 
that " thrice is he armed that hath his quar- 
rel just." To put on " the breast-plate of 
righteousness," " the shield of faith," " the 
sword of the spirit " and " the whole armor of 
God," is the injunction of Hoplology not less 
than of Scripture. And it is as true of social 
safety, as of national defense, that 

" Were half the power that fills the world with 
terror, 
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and 
courts, 
Given to redeem the human mind from error, 
There were no need of arsenals and forts." 

The whole subject, thus looked at, is a good 
illustration of how, throughout the entire uni- 



EVOLUTION AND WAR 143 

verse alike of matter and mind, and often amid 
the greatest apparent contradictions, it is pos- 
sible that one increasing purpose runs. There 
is nothing in nature which at first sight is more 
disheartening than the awful warring of its 
creatures one against another, provided for, as 
it is, in their very structure ; nothing which to 
many persons so militates against the idea of a 
loving God as the awful cruelties of that strug- 
gle for existence into which, with no choice of 
theirs, all organic beings are plunged; nothing 
which could seem less the purpose of things, es- 
pecially while the monsters of the geologic ages 
were being brought forth ever more and more 
terrible, than that the meek and the righteous 
should inherit the earth. Yet with the points 
of tooth and claw, " red in ravin," as pens, and 
the blood of her myriad creatures dying in bat- 
tle, as ink, she has been writing all the time the 
first pages of a philosophy under which of ne- 
cessity all fighting must end; and at the very 
anvils of war, with her monsters, brute and 
human, as smiths, has been forging the weapons 
ever finer and finer that alone can overcome 
violence, and which only the righteous and the 
meek inheriting the earth can wield. And in 
all the marvels of eastern magic is there any- 
thing more wonderful, more unexpected, more 
beautiful, than the story that not on a tree 
transplanted out of Paradise, or from a seed 



144 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

sown in the gardens of sentiment and nourished 
in the hot-house of the church, — but on the 
rude stalk of war, rooted in the dust of 
slaughtered myriads, spined and petaled with 
the sharp points of tooth and claw, sword and 
bayonet, and budding in the red of battle- 
fields, — there should bloom at last, in the 
midst of a hushed and waiting earth, by 
strictly natural laws, the snow-white flower of 
universal peace? 



IV 

EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 

While exploring with a party of friends sev- 
eral years ago one of the many crab-like arms 
with which Puget Sound crawls back from the 
sea up into the land, our boat anchored for 
the afternoon in a picturesque spot under the 
shadow of the Olympic mountains to allow the 
amateur artists on board — mostly ladies — to 
make a sketch of its beautiful scenery. Sud- 
denly the silence of lead-pencils, which had been 
reigning supreme for an hour or more, was 
broken by the horrified exclamation of a femi- 
nine voice, " Oh ! oh ! oh ! we are all adrift ! " 
Its occasion was the tide, which, up there amid 
the innumerable inlets it has to visit, often gets 
bewildered and loses all sense of its obligations 
to the moon, sometimes piling itself up twenty- 
six hours and calling that a day's work, and 
four feet at once, sometimes rising or falling, 
sometimes running so long in one direction 
that, like a sentence many-phrased, it seems to 
have lost all connection with its starting point 
— the tide unexpectedly turned, that was bear- 
145 



14f6 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

ing our boat its cable's length the other way 
from its anchor. On coming to a stand again, 
which it did in a moment or two, the scene we 
had been sketching, though itself the same as 
at first, was, in the aspect it presented to us, 
an almost entirely different thing. The white 
man's cabin, the Indian's tent, and the dog's 
humble kennel, before wide apart, were now in 
exact range with each other. The houses and 
hewn logs had made a complete swap in their 
visible sides and ends. A beautiful white cata- 
ract, concealed before in all except its music, 
had come plainly into sight ; and even the great 
snow-peaked mountains, immovable as they 
were at their granite bases, were parallaxed 
against a stretch of blue sky quite different 
from the cloudy one against which at first they 
had seemed to lean. Most of the artists, recog- 
nizing the changed perspective, threw their old 
sketches aside and began wholly new ones from 
their new point of view. But some, hating to 
lose their work, went on and finished out what 
they had begun, a part by drawing the uncom- 
pleted things as they remembered them to have 
looked, and others by simply adding them on 
as they now appeared. At the close of the 
afternoon we organized an extempore art ex- 
hibition. The wholly new pictures, though 
somewhat hasty, were all well enough. But 
the others ! Besides the mistakes of memory 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 147 

and the ludicrous results which had arisen from 
the mixing up of the two perspectives — the 
houses and logs with both ends visible, and the 
dog, the Indian, and the white man each with a 
double background — they all had a horrified 
jerk of the pencil where the exclamation 
" We're adrift ! " had come in, exceedingly sig- 
nificant historically, but otherwise as unmean- 
ing in art as the sudden quirk was in chirog- 
raphy that used to adorn our writing-books at 
the district school when the master came up 
from behind and rapped our knuckles with his 
ruler to keep us from making crooked lines. 
And, as we compared the two results, we all 
concluded that the best way to draw pictures 
when the tide has turned is to begin the whole 
thing anew and draw every object in them di- 
rectly from its new point of view. 

What took place with our tugboat on Puget 
Sound has taken place in our day with the 
bark of thought on the sea of life. Its tide 
has turned — the great tide of philosophy 
sweeping here and there in past ages through 
all manner of strange channels, turned at last 
in this bright afternoon of the nineteenth cen- 
tury to the side of evolution ; and it has inevit- 
ably changed with it the point of view from 
which the whole universe is to be seen. It is a 
tremendous change. Not unnaturally, when 
first discovered, it wrung forth from timid lips 



us ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

the ejaculation, " Oh ! oh ! oh ! we're all adrift ! " 
And there are some even now who refuse to rec- 
ognize in their work that anything has taken 
place ; some who go on teaching and describing 
things from the old creation standpoint, just 
as they did before ; and others — ministers, 
alas ! — who do indeed recognize the new po- 
sition, but who think the only safe way is to 
mix up the two in their views, look at nature 
and natural science from the standpoint of 
evolution, and at religion and ethics from that 
of creation, and who, with a miracle of perspec- 
tive such as the devoutest saint-painter of the 
middle ages never dreamed of, represent the 
Bible, Jesus, Christianity, and our human na- 
ture as showing at the same time a natural and 
a supernatural origin and end. But the great 
body of thinking people are coming to see more 
and more clearly that if they would not make 
their work ridiculous, the only true way is to 
lay aside reverently all forms of it drawn from 
their old position, retaining only the ripened 
skill it gave them, and begin the whole thing 
over again from the standpoint of evolution. 
Religion, history, sociology, natural science, 
education, economics, even ethics, each has got 
to be entirely rewritten. The objects them- 
selves which they deal with, these of course are 
the same ; but their perspective, their relation 
to each other and to the eye which sees them, — 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 149 

often a vastly more important element in the 
truth of things than any special facts about 
them — that is changed, that change that 
henceforth in any fair consideration of them 
must assuredly be taken into account. 

What are the relations of evolution to poli- 
tics? Here, at the very threshold of the sub- 
ject, the world's changed perspective makes it- 
self manifest. We all know what have hitherto 
been regarded as moral questions in politics. 
They have been questions about slavery, intem- 
perance, gambling, the social evil, the treatment 
of criminals, the rights of women, and the like, 
as distinguished from questions that were 
simply sanitary, civil, economic, industrial, mili- 
tary, and the like ; and their moral quality has 
been thought to consist, the same as with the 
individual, in their relation sometimes to utility, 
sometimes to happiness, sometimes to the Divine 
Will, and sometimes to an eternal distinction in 
the nature of things. But under evolution this 
old limitation with regard to them is largely 
wiped out. The scope of morality is made by 
it to be everything in man's conduct, both indi- 
vidual and social, physical and spiritual, which 
relates to his full development and well-being; 
or, as Spencer puts it, " the moral law is the 
law of the complete life, the law of the perfect 
man, the law of that state toward which crea- 



150 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

tion tends." It does not exclude the idea of an 
eternal distinction in the nature of things be- 
tween right and wrong, any more than count- 
ing on the fingers does the necessity that two 
and two would still make four even in a world 
which had no fingers to be counted on ; does not 
deny that, so far as the individual is concerned, 
motive, volition, knowledge, capacity, are im- 
portant elements in determining the moral 
character of an action ; but it says that the only 
way in which we can know of the distinction is 
by the accumulated experience of the individual 
and the race with regard to their effects, and 
that so far as society is concerned it is the ef- 
fects alone that are to be considered — the 
right being all those things which, taken as a 
rule, tend to promote the well-being of its mem- 
bers, no matter how material their form or 
lowly their motive ; the wrong, all those which, 
taken as a rule, tend to prevent it, no matter 
how religious their garb or worthy their mo- 
tive. And wherever it finds a question as to 
which of these two courses the community shall 
allow its members to enter upon or continue in, 
wherever a question of what will enable men in 
their relations with each other to best secure 
the great ends of life, whether it be that of 
freeing a street from filth or a race from bond- 
age, there it finds what to society is a moral 
question. 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 151 

It is the only definition which really covers 
the whole inner field even of recognized morality 
— is a theory which, instead of making ethics 
less rigorous and wide-reaching in forbidding 
robbery and murder and the like, as Mr. Hux- 
ley seems to fear, makes it a great deal more 
imperative and comprehensive. What are the 
worst crimes against life and property that so- 
ciety suffers from? Not those which are com- 
mitted with the point of a pistol and the blow 
of a bludgeon, but often those which are com- 
mitted with a point of law and a piece of finan- 
ciering. Here is a factory whose agent insists 
against all remonstrance on keeping its win- 
dows closed because of the finer cloth he can 
thus make, out of which a girl is carried faint- 
ing who in three weeks dies. Out of a dwell- 
ing-house near by another girl is carried, 
stabbed, who in three weeks dies also. The one 
is called a murder, and its agent is hanged for 
it. The other is called a misfortune, and its 
agent gets a dividend of ten per cent for it and 
is admitted to the church. Is there any jus- 
tice in such a distinction — any reason why all 
such cases should notjbe defined and dealt with 
as of the same moral character — anything in 
the philosophy which does it which lessens the 
stigm.a attaching to them as robbery and 
murder .? What constitutes the real essence of 
slavery.? Not alone the owning of a human 



152 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

being. When it began, as it did, in the sparing 
of a captive's life, it was a virtue. No ; but 
the treating of a man as a thing, the supplant- 
ing of his own will with the will of another, one 
of the most deadly ways of interfering with his 
well-being. And wherever this is done, whether 
in a Southern cotton-field under a system of 
lashes, or in a Northern workshop under a sys- 
tem of wages, or in a Utopian government un- 
der a system of laws, why is not the question 
of how to prevent it as much in the one case as 
in the other a moral question — a widening, 
therefore, of the ethical field? What is the 
real difference between those matters which 
ordinarily are called economical and sanitary 
and those which ordinarily are catalogued as 
ethical and moral? How many are the in- 
stances in which it is only that of flower and 
fruit, cause and effect? What makes a man 
a drunkard ? How often is it starvation wages ! 
Where do filthy lives come from? How fre- 
quently from filthy lodgings ! Debase the coin 
of a country, and how quickly will an alloy ap- 
pear in its conscience ! Put a tariff on its 
merchandise, and what is better proved by all 
experience than that it will pay a large part of 
it with its morals? And with such a relation 
between them is there any other consistent prin- 
ciple than to class them all together as parts 
more or less evolved of one moral species, steps 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 153 

higher up or lower down of one majestic lad- 
der; anything in doing so that does not give 
duty a broader base and a wider sweep? 

It is the only definition which affords a solid 
ground for the thorough scientific study and 
treatment of moral questions. The great dif- 
ficulty with their investigation hitherto has 
been their wide separation as regards the origin 
of what is most distinctive in them from all 
the other departments of scientific inquiry — 
the doctrine that though their root was in the 
" nature of things," it was a " nature " that did 
not mean nature, and " things " that had noth- 
ing to do with things. Trying to trace their 
principles into it was like pursuing a default- 
ing cashier or a boodle alderman from the 
United States into Canada, an experience in 
which science came suddenly to a dividing line 
where its writs of observation and experiment 
were no longer of any authority, and where 
only the royal missives of intuition were recog- 
nized. And with such a difference of jurisdic- 
tions, in one of which were the deeds and in the 
other the doers, it is no wonder that their 
treatment has been haphazard and confused, an 
application of remedies to effects rather than 
to their cause. It is a difficulty that the evo- 
lutionary view of what constitutes their moral 
character entirely removes. The " nature of 
things " under which they are to be studied is 



154 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

real nature. And there is no longer any in- 
consistency in recognizing that the root of an 
evil may be in a sewer because its fruit is in a 
soul. 

How are moral questions thus defined to be 
dealt with.? Back of the inquiry as to whether 
it should be through politics is the more primi- 
tive one needing first to be settled as to whether 
it should be through any human agency at all, 
except as man is unconsciously the agent of the 
Power which has the universe in charge. There 
is a large school of thinkers who distrust all 
interference of the human will for moral ends 
with the processes of nature, and especially 
with its processes in other men. They are not 
only indignant, as the English girl was with the 
swimmer who ventured, without an introduc- 
tion, to save her from drowning, but beyond 
this they deny the right of any man and of 
any body of men to save them or save society 
from anything without a direct request. Let 
things do themselves, is their motto. The 
mighty forces of evolution, which have shaped 
the physical universe so wonderful and fair, 
rounded out the earth with its marvelous ad- 
aptations of part to part, unfolded the animal 
and vegetable kingdoms to their perfection of 
form, and built up the human body into its 
splendid capacities of action, are not going to 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 155 

depend on man's puny aid, they say, for suc- 
cess, now that society is to be organized and 
morals evolved. The youth who took the place 
of Phoebus on the chariot of the Sun and at- 
tempted to drive its fiery steeds over the azure 
pave to their home in the West is to them 
modesty itself as compared with the man who 
would take the reins of nature in his hands and 
guide its forces to their moral goal. They find 
history filled with the mistakes and blunders of 
the world's would-be reformers. The objects 
that one age has labored for with all its ethical 
might have been, how often, the horror and 
curse of the next! Who would accept the 
ideals set forth in Plato's Republic, Sydney's 
Arcadia, and More's Utopia, as comparing for 
one moment with the realities that society has 
come to in the actual course of events? What 
is the source of nine-tenths of the tramps, 
drunkards, criminals, and good-for-nothings 
that society is afflicted with to-day .^^ The mis- 
taken Christian charity, it is answered, that for 
eighteen hundred years has been keeping alive 
a class of persons to perpetuate their stock 
that nature, let alone to execute her law pro- 
viding for the survival only of the fittest, would 
long since have laid harmlessly away in grave- 
yards. There are many evils, it is said, the 
same as there are many insects, which serve bet- 
ter than any human wisdom to keep each other 



156 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

down — " Evil its errand hath as well as good " 
— so that when one set is destroyed by man's 
interference it only gives the others a better 
chance to operate ; many reforms, also, that 
have a natural connection with each other and 
with the world's physical progress, so that if 
any one is artificially developed faster than its 
fellows, no matter how good it may be in it- 
self, it results, the same as with a flower pushed 
ahead of the spring-time, or with one organ of 
the body ahead of the rest, in a maladjustment 
of the new good which in its effects is worse 
tenfold than the old evil. And from such 
facts it is argued that instead of trying to 
guide nature's coach ourselves, either polit- 
ically or otherwise, our true course is to sit 
down very quietly at her side and leave its reins 
very carefully in her hands. 

Far be it from me to deny or undervalue in 
any way the tremendous moral strain of na- 
ture's own work. There is no other standpoint 
that mind can take from which it looms up so 
conspicuous and so undeniable as from that of 
evolution. It is the great mountain stream 
rising in the far-off cloudy peaks of the world's 
nebulous state, and flowing down with ever- 
increasing volume through its starry gorges, 
its bent and distorted geological strata, and its 
monstrous animal forms into the regions of its 
civilized life, the stream on the banks of which 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 157 

all human moralities are built, and by the force 
of which all human reforms are carried on. 
The universe itself all through is a moral agent, 
not of the kind perhaps always that would win 
the prize at a Sunday-school, or get its prac- 
titioner admitted into good society as a model 
of deportment, but one that has been true to 
its great principle of doing what would con- 
duce best to the ever higher well-being of itself 
and its creatures ; one that has come up from 
the wild orgies of its saurian youth into the 
decencies of a nineteenth-century manhood, and 
from its myriad bloody-nosed rounds of fisti- 
cuff with savages and barbarians to the battle- 
fields of civilized industry and to the victories 
of enlightened peace. If its contests at first 
were only those of brute strength and brute 
punning, and its survivals the survivals only 
of those that were physically fittest, it was 
simply to lay the foundations of its final moral 
structure the more solid and secure, simply be- 
cause the root of moral right, as we now know, 
is in a right physical soil. And the lily and 
the lark have not more surely come out of the 
awful struggles for existence of the vegetable 
and animal worlds than love's flower and re- 
ligion's song have from the wars of hate and 
from the grovelings of passion in the moral 
world. 



158 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

But this recognition of nature's inherent 
moral strain, instead of doing away with the 
need of man's voluntary effort in the same di- 
rection, is a stimulus all the more to its use. 
The human will is not a separate thing from 
nature any more than the human body is, but 
is a part of nature — one of its grandest 
parts. The daring injunction of the old 
apostle Paul, " Work out your own salvation 
with fear and trembling, for it is God that 
worketh in you both to will and to do," ex- 
presses the true relation of the two agents. 
And it is because of this mighty power work- 
ing within us, because our little human wheel 
is belted to the great driving-wheel of the uni- 
verse, that we can take hold of moral questions 
with some hope of being an aid in their solution. 

The right to do so, and especially the right 
of the individual to help in the solution of those 
matters which concern other individuals, is 
based on the fact that man is not a unit sepa- 
rate from all other units, but a member with 
them of an organism in whose welfare his own 
well-being is vitally bound up, and for whose 
conduct he shares with them the responsibility. 
There is indeed a sphere in w^hich the individual 
is supreme, and into which no other man and 
no body of men have the right without his con- 
sent to intrude — a sphere in which he must be 
good or bad, saved or lost by and for himself 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 159 

alone. Its existence is one of the grandest 
and most distinctive facts of our humanity. 
It is a realm in which the poorest beggar is 
monarch; a plantation on which the most ab- 
ject slave is master; a castle in which, more 
truly than in his home, every Englishman and 
every man is lord. And any social system that 
would take it away or narrow its bounds, what- 
ever compensation of other blessings it may 
promise, is to be fought against as man's bit- 
terest foe. Not less true is it, however, that 
there are other relations in which the individual 
is only one part of a larger unit, one state of a 
grander kingdom, and in which he normall}'^ 
both controls and is controlled by its other 
members. It is these two organisms, each le- 
gitimate, each the product of nature, each vi- 
brating rhythmically back and forth into the 
other, that make humanity. All the great 
questions between individualism and socialism 
turn on the extent to which their existence is 
recognized, one party going to the extreme of 
making the individual the all in all, the other 
to the extreme of subordinating everything to 
the control of society. Evolution recognizes 
them both in its principles of differentiation 
and integration; Christianity both in its com- 
mand. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself 
— words which mean not as much as thyself," 
but as being a part of thy larger self. And 



160 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

just precisely as the individual has the right 
to answer alone all moral questions in the realm 
where he alone is concerned, on precisely the 
same ground he has the right to join with 
others in answering all those in the sphere where 
he has with them a common interest. 

Then as to the wisdom and policy of at- 
tempting to guide nature's forces to their 
moral goal — are they not as pronounced here 
as in the use of the human will anywhere? 
Men do not act on the laissez-faire doctrine in 
the other relations of life — do not let the fields 
alone to give them only their native fruits, or 
the winds and waves alone to toss them where 
they please, or diseases and sickness alone to 
kill them in their own good time, or the light- 
nings and the cataract and the expansive power 
of steam alone to advance society after their 
own slow fashion. No ; they mix them up with 
humanity; they bit their wild mouths; they 
harness their mighty forces ; they mount the 
box behind their swift heels ; they guide them, 
loaded with ten thousand human interests, to 
goals that by themselves alone they would never 
reach. What is all civilization as compared 
with barbarism, what is America to-day, jeweled 
with cities, laced with railroads, waving with 
wheat-fields, rich with thought, as compared 
with America three centuries ago, a howling 
wilderness, but the refusal of men in other 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 161 

things to act on the let-alone principle? Why 
now should they act on it in the moral world? 
Why not join hands with nature in curing the 
diseases of the social body, raising richer vir- 
tues in the field of the soul, utilizing with tem- 
perance factories the eternal power that makes 
for righteousness, steaming labor on to justice, 
and making a trolley-system by which right's 
lightning shall hasten humanity's plodding feet 
on to its goal? With nature's force the same 
eternal mystery everywhere, is there any more 
immodesty in seeking to drive it with one rein 
than with another, any more impudence in 
guiding its stream of righteousness than in 
guiding its stream of lifcj any more absurdity 
in using it to improve a virtue than in using it 
to improve a vine? What if mistakes are 
made? They are not made in morals any of- 
tener than they are in art and science and phi- 
losophy, and in everything else with which man 
has to deal — are a part of the food on which 
here, as everywhere else, man grows up into 
success. What if reforms do need to move on 
together, so that a good one pushed ahead of 
the others becomes an evil? There is just 
about as much danger of mankind's making the 
earth wobble on its axis by their all crowding 
into its one good country as there is of their 
disturbing its moral balance by their all uniting 
in one reform. Taste averages here as safely 



16S ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

as in all other things. And just as the same 
swing of the earth along its orbit that brings 
the bobolink to his northern home in spring- 
time, brings him the green meadows to sing in, 
just so the same eternal spirit, in its larger 
orbit that inspires the reformer to utter his 
song, operates to make the field ready in which 
it is to be sung, and to make spring also in all 
its surrounding fields. 

How has the world's moral progress thus far 
been carried on? Just as certainly by the ac- 
tion of human wills as by the great working 
force of nature. The crown and climax of 
the universe's moral force, the last and finest 
form in which it ultimates itself, is mankind's 
volition. Other things are used to make its 
trunk and limbs, but it blossoms only in souls, 
and fruits itself only through wills. 

More important still, it is man's personal ef- 
fort in moral questions that is^ 4^he source of 
that best of all results that comes out of them, 
his own moral character. If nature did all, 
and man was only the recipient, reforms might 
indeed be conducted as well as, perhaps better 
than, they are now; but they would not and 
could not have that wonderful flavor about 
them which makes them distinctively moral. It 
is the giver, not receiver, that in the struggles 
of humanity upward gets the greater blessing. 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 163 

" Not the grapes of Canaan that repay, 
But the high faith that failed not on the way." 

What was the most precious outcome of the an- 
ti-slavery struggle and our Civil War ? Not the 
freedom of the slave, or the salvation of the 
Union, or the new life it gave to liberty beyond 
the seas. No ; but the new manhood into which 
it lifted up ourselves, the finer quality of union 
that it brought to our whole land, North and 
South. It is this kind of success that always 
comes in all moral struggles, however much they 
fail outwardly — this the laurel that the van- 
quished equally with the victors all win in the 
battles that are fought for human rights. 

So I say in answer to this part of the in- 
quiry that it is a strict deduction from the prin- 
ciples of evolution that men are to take an ac- 
tive part in dealing with the world's moral is- 
sues. I saw a coachman a while ago with his 
chubby two-j^ear-old boy on the seat in front 
of him driving a spirited pair of horses. " He 
is young yet," said he, " and I keep a good grip 
on the reins back of him; but he'll come to it 
himself with a little practice by and by. He's 
got the blood of six generations of coachmen 
in him, and blood tells the same here as every- 
where. Why," he continued, " we're all of 
us born into the world with a twist in our wrists 
for holding the ribbons ; and I am going to 



164 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

train him so that when I am old and decrepit I 
can sit on the back seat feeling safe and let 
him do all the driving." So with nature. 
Yes ; ridiculous as it has been thought to be, she 
has taken her boy, Man, with her up on the 
great coach of the universe and has given him 
its reins. He is young yet, and she keeps a 
good grip on them herself at the same time. 
But he has got her stock in him for sixty thou- 
sand generations, and she knows that such 
stock in the end will tell. He, too, is born 
every time with a twist in his soul-wrists for 
moral driving. And in the long eons yet to 
come, when her form outwardly has grown old 
and decrepit, she too, perhaps, expects to sit 
on the back seat of the spiritual universe and 
let him do all the driving. 

The settling of this point, however, does not 
by any means settle the whole subject. There 
are two ways of driving, two methods in morals 
of helping things along. One is with politics, 
State authority, and the whip and spur of law ; 
the other with inward principle, voluntary as- 
sociation, and the voice and rein of reason. 
And the question yet to be answered is, Which 
of these does evolution lead up to and sanction .f' 

The great nations of antiquity, as is well 
known, placed their chief reliance on the first 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 165 

of these methods. The words of Pliny, Non 
est princeps supra leges, sed leges supra prin- 
cipem — principle is not above laws, but laws 
are above principle — and of Aristotle, that the 
State exists before the individual, and not the 
individual before the State, expressed the almost 
universal sentiment. What the world in its 
early days wanted beyond everything else, 
wanted with an intensity we can hardly realize 
now, was stability, a condition of things fixed 
against change, violence, disorder ; and this it 
had in the State, this the origin and meaning of 
its name. Its form at first was naturally im- 
perialism — that of the one strong man who 
could suppress disorder. He was its govern- 
ment; his will its law; obedience to him its 
morals. The oft-quoted saying of Louis XIV, 
" I am the State," was what all kings believed ; 
the pious sentiment of the Bishop of Rheims, 
" When God had made Napoleon he rested from 
his labors," an expression of the reverence for 
great leaders as the greatest of divine gifts that 
all people felt. But kings were not always 
kingly or rulers always righteous ; and little by 
little, each step a battle, each line a revolution, 
legalism took the place of imperialism, the peo- 
ple's law of the prince's will. Frederick the 
Great, wishing a windmill removed from before 
his palace that its owner would not sell, threat- 
ened to have it taken away by force. " There 



166 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

is a supreme court at Berlin," answered the 
miller ; and the windmill stands before the palace 
to this day, a monument to the might of law 
against the might even of kings. But amid all 
these changes of form the State itself remained, 
the center of men's hopes, the object of their 
devotion, as honored under law as leader, demon 
as despot. The habit acquired through long 
ages of reverencing it as the source of all public 
order and the means of all public good had be- 
come a part of our very nature. And so it was 
almost inevitable when men in the progress of 
modern civilization came to have great moral 
questions to deal with that they should look to 
politics and political action as the chief, if not 
the only means by which they could be satis- 
factorily settled. 

Evolution, however, has so sooner built up 
anything, even a sentiment, than it begins either 
to tear it down or to shape it over into some- 
thing else. Gradually in our time a change is 
taking place in not a few minds with regard to 
the value of law and the State as the means of 
promoting any of man's interests. Emerson's 
words — " We are kept by better gods than the 
will of magistrates " ; " good men must not obey 
the laws too well " ; " to educate the wise man 
the State exists, and with the appearance of the 
wise man the State expires " — express a wide- 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 167 

spread feeling not among cranks and bomb- 
throwers merely, but among sober, orderly, 
peaceful thinkers. It is the same kind of so- 
ciological change, only a stage farther along, 
as that by which imperialism gave way to con- 
stitutionalism and the potentate to the politi- 
cian — a change by which now legalism is giv- 
ing way to individualism, law to liberty, politics 
to principle. The old order which put the 
State above the citizen, the laws above princi- 
ples, has been already entirely reversed. 
Governments are being remanded, if not into 
the rubbish heap of the world's back yard, yet 
into a secondary and subordinate place. And 
whereas men have relied in the past on the 
sovereign and the statute book for order, 
safety, property, happiness, they are now fast 
coming to rely for them simply on themselves. 

It is a change which has preeminently made 
itself felt in the estimate of politics as a means 
of dealing with moral questions. The very 
names of the two things have come to have a 
natural incongruity with each other. As 
Emerson says, " What satire on government 
can equal the word politic, which for ages has 
signified cunning, intimating that the State is 
a trick?" 

Who are chosen to act as our legislators.'' 
If it is a question of carpentry, we do not trust 



168 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

a man to build even a hen-coop who has not had 
some little apprenticeship at the trade; but in 
this most difficult of all arts, the building of a 
State, the shaping of what is to be a moral habi- 
tation, the one, as Burke says, that " requires 
all the experience a person can gain in his whole 
life," how often are those chosen who have 
never spent one hour in studying the real na- 
ture of government and of morals, and whose 
sole qualification is their ability to manipulate a 
caucus,, pander to a popular prejudice, or, it 
may be, buy outright the popular vote ! 

What are moral questions used for in poli- 
tics? As soon as the first outburst of enthu- 
siasm is over out of which the parties that take 
them up are born, how inevitably does the exe- 
cution of their principles sink into a secondary 
place, and their main use become the keeping of 
their advocates in power! If Jove laughs at 
lovers' vows, how he must roar at politicians' 
promises ! The performances of a circus on 
its advertising board fence and in its actual 
equestrian ring, or even the virtues of a citizen 
on his grave-stone and in his life, are hardly 
wider apart than those of a political party be- 
fore election and afterward. The story is told 
in the adventures of the famous Baron Mun- 
chausen, that coming one night to what seemed 
a great island in the far-off sea, some of his 
sailors climbed up its steep sides and made on 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 169 

its top a fire with which to cook their supper. 
The supposed island, however, proved to be a 
huge whale asleep on the water; and as soon 
as the fire had burned a little into his blubber, 
it waked him up and down he went, sailors, sup- 
per, fire, and all, to his home in the vasty deep. 
And that is the experience reformers have had 
again and again when they have climbed up on 
the back of some apparently continental politi- 
cal party and kindled there the moral fire with 
which to cook a supper of temperance, woman's 
suffrage, or labor rights. As soon as it began 
to burn down into the fat, how quickly has it 
become a whale and left them and their cause 
exactly where Munchausen's sailors were, floun- 
dering in the watery deep! As Hosea Biglow 
declares : 

" Constitouents are hendy to help a man in, 
But arterwards they don't weigh the heft of a 
pin." 

Then the methods by which politics and leg- 
islation are carried on — the manipulations of 
the caucus and primary meeting, the torchlight 
processions, hurrahing and mud-flinging of the 
campaign, and the log-rolling, bribery, and par- 
tisanship of the lobby-room — who will say they 
are the ones out of which nice moral results are 
likely to come.? Is there really any evil in so- 
ciety to-day that politics can be set to run 



170 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

down which is worse than politics itself, any- 
thing which needs reforming more imperatively 
than the would-be political reformer? A dudish 
hunter went out into the woods one morning 
with his equally dudish dog and started a wolf. 
An hour after, meeting a grim old farmer, he 
asked him if he had seen anything of the two. 
" Oh, yes," said the farmer, " I saw them go- 
ing by here a little while ago fast as they could 
run." " And how near were they to each 
other? " anxiously inquired the youth. 
" Well," answered the farmer, " the dog when 
I saw them was about two lengths ahead, but 
the wolf was fast overhauling him, and I guess 
that by this time they are just about together." 
So with very much of the politics that we have 
started out to hunt down moral evil. The 
hunter may indeed be some two lengths ahead 
now, but the game is fast coming up with him, 
and the two very soon will be together — one 
inside of the other. 

But even where politics is pure and honest, 
as, indeed, it sometimes is, even when the wisest 
and best of men get together to make laws, as, 
indeed, they sometimes do, there are limitations 
in the method itself which make it in dealing 
with moral issues only of partial value. The 
proposed law has to be cut and trimmed and 
pared down to meet their varying tastes. It 
never can be the embodiment of the highest and 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 171 

most advanced principles, never at the best 
ahead of what the average mind, the bare ma- 
jority of a people, will sustain; otherwise it will 
be only a dead letter. And when it is enforced 
it secures to itself only an outward obedience, 
not the homage of the soul ; cuts down the 
branch of evil, but leaves its root to unfold, it 
may be, in a far worse shape ; suppresses the 
saloon, but drives the jug into the home ; wipes 
out slavery, but puts in its place the race prob- 
lem; shuts up the brothel, but sows the whole 
city with its inmates ; provides, perhaps, in the 
very fact of obedience to its letter, a quietus to 
the conscience for breaking, all the more, its 
inward spirit. " Sammy," said a mother to her 
little boy who was playing in the yard, and 
whom she wished to keep from the dangers of 
the street, " don't 3^ou go out of that gate." 
" No, mother," he answered, " I won't go out 
of it." Ten minutes after, beholding him 
making mud pies right between the cart ruts, 
she angrily exclaimed; " Samuel, why didn't 
you obey me? Didn't I tell you not to go out 
of that gate.?" "Yes, mother," he replied, 
" and I did obey you. I didn't go out of the 
gate; I climbed over the fence." How many 
are the grown-up Samuels who strictly obey 
the State mother when she tells them not to go 
out of the gate into evil, but who in doing so 
manage all the same to make for themselves 



172 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

plenty of mud pies out in the roads of vice and 
wrong by climbing conscience-easy over the un- 
prohibited garden fence ! 

Worst of all, as a politically made law can 
express only the average morality as regards 
virtue, so also it can meet only the average 
need as regards justice. It can not discrimi- 
nate, can not take into account an evil's intensi- 
fying and extenuating circumstances, can 
judge only by the outward act, has to saw off 
its punishment as we saw wood, by the foot 
measure ; and the best legislation thus applied 
becomes sometimes an instrument of wrong that 
wrong itself would hardly dare originate. A 
little lame boy nine years old, with no home 
and no friends, who had stolen a few pennies, is 
seized by it and locked up in jail, at first alone, 
where, so timid and so little beyond babyhood 
was he, that the sheriff had to put a light in his 
cell to keep him from crying all night, after- 
ward for four months with a vile, licentious 
negro. And at the same time the boodle alder- 
men, the defaulting cashier, and the downright 
thief, who have stolen moneys by the hundred 
thousand, are enabled — how many of them ! 
— to walk, money and all, through law's un- 
locked doors. A woman with a nursing baby 
is sentenced to ten days' imprisonment for call- 
ing a man who had insulted her " vile names," 
so little hardened that on hearing the sentence 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 173 

she fainted away; while in every great political 
canvass a thousand newspapers on each side 
fling charges at each other and at the opposite 
candidates too outrageous to be expressed by 
the term " vile names," all not only unrebuked 
by law, but sustained by it as the necessary in- 
struments sometimes of settling great moral 
questions. It was found a while ago in the 
city where I live that its charities were encour- 
aging idleness among the overgrown boys in 
some of its families, and a law was made that 
no household should receive public aid which 
had children whose age was over twenty-one — 
a most righteous law apparently ; but the very 
first case it cut off was that of a half -blind old 
lady of eighty who was doing her best to sup- 
port an idiot daughter of forty — the most de- 
serving case in the whole city. Visiting the 
veteran keeper of our county jail on one occa^ 
sion, I expressed the opinion that in the twenty 
years of his official life he must have seen a very 
dark side of human nature. " No," said he, 
" the average of those who come here is quite 
as good as the average outside. Of course I 
get some downright rascals, but usually the big 
villains have too much shrewdness, or too much 
money, or too much legal help to get into my 
clutches. Most of those who come to me are 
men who have some one weak place in their na- 
ture which some one combination of circum- 



174 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

stances has happened to assail, but who other- 
wise are exceptionally good men and men who in 
all other circumstances would have lived and 
died respected citizens." 

Then, apart from the failure of the political 
method to reach the worst cases of immorality, 
how many are the lives of earth's noblest and 
best that it has sacrificed on its scaffolds and 
gallows, not unintentionally through mistakes 
of evidence, but knowingly because of their ef- 
forts to bring about a higher morality ! 

" Alas ! the blows for error meant 
Too oft on truth itself are spent." 

What is it that has slaughtered liberty's advo- 
cates on a thousand battle-fields.'* The sword 
of law's defenders. What has been the worst 
obstacle that reform — our anti-slavery reform, 
for instance — has had to encounter.'* No- 
toriously the statute book. What stands next 
to church law as responsible throughout all time 
for the blood of the world's martyrs .^^ Beyond 
question political law. A few years ago war- 
rants were issued for the arrest of eight men 
charged with murdering the Chicago police. 
One of them could not be found and might 
easily have escaped even a trial; but conscious, 
apparently, of his own innocence and hoping 
by his influence to save his companions, he vol- 
untarily walked into the court-house during 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 175 

their trial and gave himself up to its officers. 
It was a deed of trust in law and of gallantry 
toward comrades that in the days of classic 
Greece and Rome would have challenged the 
world's admiration, and which might apparently 
even in our day have weighed something in 
showing that he was no ordinary criminal; but 
law can have no eye for chivalry and no sense 
of honor in dealing with its offenders. He was 
proved guilty of throwing out, if not bombs, 
yet dangerous sentiments, the guilt of reform- 
ers in all ages, and was hanged as remorselessly 
as if he had been an actual murderer stabbing 
for money and cornered, in spite of himself, by 
a vigilant police. 

Such cases are the result of what must al- 
ways be a limitation of the political method in 
dealing with moral questions, the fixedness of 
its enactments. When nature has settled a 
point of right, she immediately leaves it to 
take care of itself thenceforth, and goes on to 
help settle another; but when law has settled a 
point of right, it immediately sits down square 
upon it, and devotes all its energies ever after 
to keeping it settled. It is like the old farmer's 
horse — good when you want it to stand, but 
very poor when you want it to go. In its eyes 
the right is all accomplished good, and to be 
defended; the wrong all unaccomplished good, 
and to be resisted. The worst foe of new 



176 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

morality is law-embodied old morality. Legis- 
lation is a man who makes barrels by putting 
the boy Principle inside of them to hold up their 
heads while he drives on the hoops — a good 
way if each barrel thus finished was the last ever 
needing to be built. But every time he is called 
upon to build a better one, it makes it necessary 
for the boy to smash the old one in order to get 
out — a process which naturally causes a good 
deal of disturbance, as very often the smashing 
has to be done with gunpowder. The path of 
the world's moral progress through the ages is 
marked by its smashed and abandoned laws. 
As Mr. Buckle puts it, " Every great reform 
which has been effected has consisted not in do- 
ing something new, but in undoing something 
old." And with such a record the satisfaction 
which is felt at getting the world's moral prpg- 
ress into law must necessarily be a good deal 
modified by the certainty that the very next 
question will be how to get it out of law. 

In contrast with political action, look at 
man's other great method of aiding morals — 
that of education, of voluntary association, and 
of appeals to reason and conscience. " Where 
is your music?" said a bystander to a soldier 
of the Eighth Massachusetts Regiment as it 
was hurrying through the angry streets of 
Baltimore to the defense of the nation's capital 
at the outbreak of our Civil War. " Down in 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 177 

the breech of our rifles," was the grim reply. 
And that is how we want to carry out moral 
music as we go forth to the defense of right 
and justice on the battle-fields of human life 
— not so much in the drum and fife of a polit- 
ical caucus and a legislative hall as down in the 
depths of our souls. 

" Within himself he found the law of right." 

It is the naturally evolved successor to the 
method of law. There is no characteristic of 
our times more marked than the number, size, 
and sweep of the reformatory movements that 
with the decadence of politics and the loosening 
of the legal bond have sprung up into doing 
what was once considered to be almost exclu- 
sively the politician's and legislator's work. 
Religion, so long divorced from morality, has in 
our day recognized its claims and begun pouring 
into it the might of its divine inspiration. The 
Church itself is no longer, at least in free coun- 
tries, a State institution, or governed, at least 
in its Protestant form, on State principles, but 
is simply a series of voluntary moral associa- 
tions. And wherever any new issue comes up 
in the world at large, or any new and difficult 
vrork presents itself needing to be done, it is the 
instinct of its advocates to form among them- 
selves a society to take it in charge — this even 
when the Government is to be asked ultimately 
to act as its agent. A salt dissolved in water 



178 ASPECTS OF EA^OLUTION 

so that its atoms can act freely according to 
to their own internal law does not more surely 
arrange itself in a crystal than humanity indi- 
vidualized in the medium of liberty does into a 
voluntary organization. It is a phenomenon 
going on before our eyes to-day which tran- 
scends in beauty anything ever seen in the 
chemist's laboratory, yet is looked upon by how 
many as if it was only society going to pieces. 
And in settling moral questions, who will say 
that humanity thus crystallized is not a more 
highly evolved agency than humanity in its 
merely amorphous, political state? 

It is the method of equality, of self-respect, 
and of manliness. When a thing is done be- 
cause of a law imposed by another, no matter 
how worthy in itself the thing may be, and no' 
matter whether that other is a monarch or a 
majority, it inevitably places its doer in a po- 
sition of inferiority, makes him a thing moved 
by an outside force rather than a , man self- 
moved. But when it is done from inward prin- 
ciple, it makes each man his own monarch and 
puts him on a par with every other man. It 
appeals to and develops that which is noblest 
and best in man — his power of choice and his 
own sense of right. \ 

" A voice spake in his ear, 
And, lo! all other voices far and near 
Died at that whisper full of meanings clear." 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 179 

It brings together in support of a cause only 
those who have a heart and soul interest in its 
success, those who love it and can lay on its 
altar the enthusiasm of love. It is indeed open 
to fanaticism, narrowness, crankiness ; but it is 
lifted realms above the far worse vices, so com- 
mon in politics, of selfishness, shallowness, and 
time-serving. All the noblest qualities of our 
human nature — altruism, self-sacrifice, the 
courage of conviction, and the living for an 
ideal, all the crosses and martyr stakes of our 
race, all its noblest poems and most heroic deeds 
— gather, if not inevitably, yet naturally 
around its standard. And, in spite of the pop- 
ular odium attaching to the name reformer, if 
you want to stand on the mountain tops of hu- 
manity, want to see how near dust can come to 
Deity, want to breathe an atmosphere as far 
removed from politics as that of Shasta from a 
sink, go into the company of men who 

** Ere its cause bring fame and profit and *tis pros- 
perous to be j ust " 

have sided with a moral truth — • men like Phil- 
lips, Garrison, Foster, Pillsbury, and their as- 
sociates in the early days of the anti-slavery 
cause. So with the kind of morality that is at- 
tained by the moral method. It is the real 
article. What is done by it is done from prin- 
ciple, done because the thing is really believed 



180 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

in, and not from outward constraint. Take the 
man who is temperate from inward conviction, 
as compared with the one who is temperate be- 
cause the law will not allow him anything on 
which to get drunk ; can there be any question 
as to which is the higher kind of man? And 
a State all of whose moral questions have been 
settled in souls, can it be otherwise than a bet- 
ter one to live in than that which has settled 
them only on statute books? 

It is a method, to be sure, whose outward in- 
strumentalities are insignificant and unimpos- 
ing; one that, in comparison with the enginery 
and m.ajesty of law — the police officer, the 
court, the judge, the prison, the gallows — is 
a mere " voice crying in the wilderness." But 
what has been historically the most efficient 
moral agency this world has ever seen, the 
Christian religion, was at the start that very 
thing, a mere voice crying in the wilderness. 
It despised the aid of law — was, rather, so 
conscious of its own innate superiority that it 
did not take the trouble to despise it. Think 
of Jesus as lobbying in the Sanhedrim to get 
it to enact his Golden Rule, or of Paul as drop- 
ping the sword of the spirit to manipulate a 
caucus for his nomination to a position where 
he could introduce a bill against idolatry. In- 
stead of being helped by law, it had from the 
start all the power of law, yea, the very prin- 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 181 

ciple of law, to contend against; and it did it 
triumphantl}^, did it even when its foe was the 
Roman Empire, that very embodiment of law — 
went on doing it against the whole vast em- 
pire of wrong, till, deserting its own weapons, 
it began arming itself with those of its antag- 
onist. I saw a place on Cape Ann a while ago 
where a soft pine seedling had lodged itself in 
a cleft of rock, the most hopeless, apparently, 
of all localities in which to grow, a bit of soft 
woody tissue surrounded with solid walls of 
granite and with only impalpable light and air 
to be its nourishment. Yet the pine with the 
drill and dynamite of its inner life force had 
rent asunder the huge granite ledge, elbowed 
tons of it out of the way, and, as a tall tree, 
was waving its evergreen boughs in the April 
sunshine, unharmed even with a scar. And that 
is what moral force is in the ledges of wrong — 
a tissue softer than that of the pine seedling, 
yet rending into powder what defies the sharp- 
est penalties of the statute book and finding 
food where the sword of law finds only flint. 

With such a contrast between the two things, 
can there be any doubt as to which is to be 
sought after as at least the preferable one for 
advancing the world's moral interests? While 
believing thoroughly in woman's right to the 
ballot, is it not a mistake to measure her prog- 
ress as a social factor by the degree to which 



182 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

it has been attained? There are scores of 
places to which she is being admitted — notably 
to the college, the counting-room, the platform, 
and the sacred desk — that are worth to her 
infinitely more than anything, from polls to 
presidential chair, that politics has to offer. 
And however willing she may be to take it as 
the symbol of her equality with man, is it worth 
while for her to pay a very large price for what, 
as an agency in helping morals along, is like a 
seat in a country wagon to a girl who has got 
her hand on the throttle-valve of a locomotive 
engine? So with reformers possessed of the 
ballot who never succeed in getting their ideas 
materialized in any political measure — go down 
to the grave, after years of struggle, with them 
embodied, perhaps, only in their own tottering 
forms ; they are not on that account valueless 
as moral factors. There are men in the world 
— you have some in your own ranks — ripe 
with age, yet blossoming continually with new 
hopes and plans for humanity, orange trees in 
the realm of soul, whose simple personality is 
doing more for progress than any political ac- 
tivity could. A vote in the minority is lost; a 
man in the minority always counts. And an 
association like this, made up of such men, 
young and old, and operating wholly through 
ideas, is raising, if nothing more, yet a raw 
material for ethics, without which at last all 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 183 

the factors of it would come to a stand. So 
with the churches that, refusing to meddle with 
politics, give their whole energies to the making 
of better souls. I know it is the custom of 
progressionists to despise their work, and I am 
very far from believing it is religion's whole 
sphere. But they, too, have their place. 
What this world wants more than anything 
else for the solving of its moral problems is 
moral men and women. Human nature is the 
soil out of which all social fruits grow; and 
whatever makes that richer will make every- 
thing above it righter. 

Nevertheless, with all this immeasurable su- 
periority intrinsically and philosophically of 
the moral over the political method in dealing 
with the questions at issue, practical sociology 
is very far from saying that the political one 
is yet wholly a thing of the past and never now 
under any circumstances to be used for their 
solution. Adaptation to the environment as 
well as intrinsic excellence is what here, as well 
as everywhere else, has to be taken into account. 
First archism ; then legalism ; then anarchism ; 
or, if the words are better liked, first imperial- 
ism, then legalism, then individualism — prince, 
politician, principle — that is the natural order 
in which all government unfolds, that the one 
each part of which has a corresponding phase 



184 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

of social development it is best fitted for. And 
as in religion the law is the school-master to 
bring us to Christ, so in the State politics is 
naturally the path by which we go to principle. 
With social development the same everywhere, 
the progress from the one to the other would be 
everywhere the same. But it is notorious that 
while some parts of society are enlightened 
enough to act on principle, others, even in the 
most advanced communities, are yet in that sav- 
age and half-civilized condition for which the 
personal ruler and the strong arm of law are 
best adapted. And where this is the case it 
surely is the dictate of plain good sense to use 
the tool, whatever its intrinsic imperfection, 
which will best do the task. " I believe in blood 
as much as any one does," said the horse- 
trader ; " but when I see a really good animal 
I go for him, no matter how mongrel his an- 
cestry may be," a wisdom that will apply equally 
well to legal scrubs as compared with the blood- 
stock of principle. Electricity is a higher mo- 
tive power for moving street cars than horse 
muscle, and a dynamo in each car a higher one 
than a wire connecting it with a central sta- 
tion. But, till the separate dynamo is per- 
fected, we use the wire; and when the wire will 
not act, as is the case now and then, we bring 
out the old horses and hitch them on in the old 
way. And for the same reason, though moral 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 185 

principle is a higher force than law with which 
to move the car of progress, and a moral dy- 
namo in each man's soul a better form of it 
than a central one at Albany or Washington, it 
nevertheless is a matter of practical wisdom, 
when the dynamo breaks down or can not be ap- 
plied, to keep the old political horses as the 
force on which to fall back. 

It is indeed true that law can never rise above 
the average morals of the State, never express 
its most advanced sentiment ; but, on the other 
hand, it is an immense instrument for doing 
what in some respects is even more important 
— the bringing of its less advanced members up 
to the average and the keeping of them from 
dragging the whole into destruction. Here is 
a village where moral suasion has succeeded in 
shutting up all the drinking saloons but one. 
The very fact, however, that the others have 
been closed makes it all the more profitable to 
keep this open, all the more difficult, therefore, 
for it to be acted upon by moral suasion. Why 
now should such a premium on its baseness be 
allowed — why not the great majority of citi- 
zens who want it closed get together politically 
and shut it up with the power of law? Here is 
a state where a hundred factories have been 
persuaded not to employ children under twelve 
or fifteen years of age, but a dozen more selfish 
ones persist in their employment, and as a con- 



186 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

sequence are able to undersell the others, or else 
compel them to reduce the wages of their adult 
hands to a level with those of the children. Is 
not this a case where law can properly inter- 
fere to put them all on the same footing? Or, 
worse still, here is a man who, through igno- 
rance or a flippant contempt for science, throws 
his ofFal into a brook or keeps open a filthy sewer 
till it threatens the whole village with a deadly 
epidemic. Ought there to be any scruple about 
lifting him up by political action to at least the 
average height of sanitary morals .^^ A traveler 
attacked by a savage dog, as he was passing 
peaceably by a farm-house, seized his gun and 
poured its whole blazing charge down the crea- 
ture's throat. " What did you kill my dog 
for.? " exclaimed the angry owner, rushing out. 
" To prevent his killing me," was the answer. 
" Well, why didn't you hit him with the butt 
end of your gun.? " was the next question. 
" Well, why didn't he come at me with the butt 
end of his body .? " was the neat reply. There 
are some evils in society so savage and wide- 
mouthed that if a man waits to deal with them 
morally there will not be any man, the same as 
if the traveler had waited to tame the dog, there 
would not have been any traveler left. And in 
such cases, savage as the method seems, is there 
any other alternative than to give them the blaz- 
ing legal end of society's moral gun.'' 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 187 

Laws do indeed have a tendency to become the 
prisons of moral principle, needing often to be 
violently destroyed when any new onward step is 
to be taken. But that is true of all forms, all 
institutions, all growths, is true of the human 
body itself, is true even of the customs, habits, 
and societies by which morality as a principle 
acts, is true at last of the " grand old man " 
who for sixty years has stood at the forefront 
of England's reforms. It is the fundamental 
method of evolution, building up and then tear- 
ing down, imprisoning life in one generation, 
and then sweeping its forms all into graves in 
order to have it move on into better ones in the 
next. 

** Ever by losses the right must gain, 
Every good have its birth in pain.*' 

And its operation in the field of politics, its 
having the laws which morality leaves in and 
blooms in during its spring become the dead 
leaves and dead petals which it has to shake off 
in its autumn so as to have its tree grow, only 
brings the political method the more clearly 
within the scope of evolution. 

Laws at first produce only outward morality ; 
but outward morality kept up long enough be- 
comes habit, exactly the same as inward 
morality does, and habit inherited becomes na- 
ture, the inmost thing of all. It is the method 



188 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

that all parents use in the training of chil- 
dren, the forming of good habits through obedi- 
ence to outward precepts. It is closely con- 
nected with " the influence of the environment," 
the working from the outward inward, which 
under evolution is certainly one of nature's rec- 
ognized methods of progress. And with society 
freed by any means from immoral surroundings 
and its young trained up simply to good habits 
for a few generations, who can doubt that the 
moral gain, if not equal to that of inward per- 
sonal struggle, would at any rate be immense,? 
There is no denying that laws are often badly 
administered and do harm ; but, with all the 
tremendous value of inward principle, it must 
be confessed that its practical working is some- 
times in this respect very far from being per- 
fect. Who shall say that custom, fashion, pub- 
lic opinion, the channels entirely independent of 
law through which morality expresses itself, are 
not often as tyrannical and unjust as any legis- 
lation has ever been? Take the awful penalty 
that society inflicts on a fallen woman, laid down 
in no statute book; and in all the multiplied 
crimes of law against the sex, is there anything 
that for absolute damning wrong will compare 
with this.? What is it behind judge and jury 
that in all ages has burned and shot and hanged 
the world's martyrs and reformers.? There is 
nothing in the vilest legislation which is so much 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 189 

to be dreaded as the world's unlegalized spasms 
of virtue. It is hardly twenty years since the 
man who did more than all others to open the 
Pacific Railroad, actually putting his money, as 
the event has proved, " where it would do the 
most good," the manliest man Congress had 
that year, was hounded into his grave without 
judge or jury by the country's conscience. 
Trial by jury — law's method — is bad enough ; 
but what is it in comparison with trial by news- 
paper, the public's method outside of law? 
And with all the dreadfulness of the reporter's 
pen as a panderer to vice, is it ever quite so 
dangerous as when it dips itself in the ink of 
righteousness and prepares to come out as the 
champion of virtue — any damage it ever does 
with its account of the murder's perpetration 
that can quite equal what it does with its ac- 
count of the murderer's punishment? 

While political laws, also, are often petty, 
inquisitive, and a severe restriction on personal 
liberty, are they more so than the rules and 
pledges of even the most pronounced voluntary 
associations? What State ever made regula- 
tions for its citizens that went down to a finer 
point than those which many temperance or- 
ganizations and trades-unions make for them- 
selves? The fact is, it is impossible to have 
anywhere the tremendous power which comes 
from associated action without the sacrifice to 



190 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

some extent of individual freedom. The most 
voluntary reform societies appealing to the 
world by moral suasion do have, and must have, 
rules among themselves of some kind in order to 
use to the greatest advantage even moral sua- 
sion ; must have an iron-bound bucket with 
which to draw water even from the wells of 
liberty. The degree of their rigor and minute- 
ness depends not on whether they are made by 
the State or by a voluntary association, but 
deeper down on the people themselves, Russian 
nihilism being just as despotic as Russian im- 
perialism, and the town meeting in America 
quite as free as the town debating club. And 
so likewise the mean and objectionable things 
about politics — the caucusing, partisanship, 
bribery, log-rolling, bossism, and appeals to 
prejudice and passion — do not arise from the 
nature of the State, but from the undeveloped 
nature of man, are to be found in voluntary as- 
sociations, even in churches and religious con- 
ventions, quite as devilishly developed as in 
ward rooms and legislative halls. 

Crowning all else, it is to be said on the sicle 
of political action that it is not infrequently 
the direct means by which the moral method 
does its work. The politics of a free country is 
the great public school to which all its citizens 
go inevitably as pupils. It is impossible to get 
a law enacted which involves in any way their 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS igi 

welfare without at least some discussion of its 
right and wrong principles. Every election- 
eering campaign is a debate of its members in 
which, mixed in with the meanness and the mud- 
throwing, the precious stones of right and vir- 
tue and moral obligation are flung from side to 
side. If the calendar of politicians is darkened 
with names that are the synonyms of cunning 
and self-seeking, it is starred also with such 
shining ones in the ranks of principle as those 
of a Sumner, a Gladstone, a Cavour. And even 
in the worst machinations of the caucus and the 
lobby there is often an unconscious, unintended 
moral wisdom that surpasses in its practical ef- 
fect the sober designing of the churches and 
schools, a divinity that shapes the ends of poli- 
tics to morals, rough hew them with bribery and 
trickery as their actors may, presidents elected 
from the ranks of pot-house politicians as one 
of themselves whom the dignity and responsi- 
bility of their position have converted into 
models of official conduct, microbes of political 
vice that have proved the best possible antidotes 
of some of the civil ones that were consuming 
the general body of society, and seeds of law 
sown in the dirt and filth of selfishness and cor- 
ruption that have flowered in public virtue and 
fruited in moral progress. 

Is there any improvement of politics, any 



19^ ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

further development of the State, which can 
remove their defects and make them more effi- 
cient as moral agents? I do not see how State 
socialism — that is, the enlargement of their* 
functions — is going to do it. It is a move- 
ment in the very opposite direction of that to 
which evolution naturally tends ; a use of law 
greater instead of less, a working more from 
without instead of more from within. The evils 
of the political method which are now in a few 
fields it would transfer to all, bring everything 
under the control of the politician. And just 
in proportion as it relieved the individual of the 
moral strain under which he now so often falls, 
it would relieve him of the moral strength under 
which he now so largely stands. 

Neither can I see any reason for going with 
Mr. Spencer to the other extreme — that of 
limiting the functions of the State to the pun- 
ishment of crime and stigmatizing all laws for 
the direct promotion of a people's welfare as 
among " the sins of legislators." If it is right 
for the State to stop murder by shutting up 
murderers, why is it not right for it to do 
it by shutting up the saloons which make 
the murderers.^ If it can properly interfere 
with the man who maims another with a club, 
then why not with the one who maims another 
with a polluted stream or a dangerous wall? 
Or, if it can support a police officer and a jail 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 193 

for the sake of maintaining the peace of so- 
ciety, then why not a school-master and a school- 
room? The more evolved philosophy here, as 
everywhere else, would seem to be prevention 
rather than cure, dealing with the fountain 
rather than the stream. And on Mr. Spencer's 
own ground that the State is to secure to every 
man freedom to do all he wills, provided he 
does not infringe on the equal freedom of every 
other man, all laws needful for this, and es- 
pecially all laws like those relating to education, 
which tend to make him less desirous of in- 
fringing on the equal freedom of others, would 
seem fairly to be within its province. 

If the State is to be improved at all as an 
agency for dealing with moral questions, the 
principles of evolution point plainly to more 
freedom, more reliance on the individual, more 
the character of a voluntary association as the 
direction in which the improvement is to be 
sought. The worst thing about it now is its 
assumption that its laws have a special sanctity 
and authority by virtue of their being made by 
it, and that it has a natural right to impose 
them on all the people within its limits inde- 
pendent of their direct personal consent. The 
conception of it presented in such works as 
" Mulford's Nation," and in so many patriotic 
sermons and Fourth of July orations, designed 
to excite reverence for it as an institution in- 



194 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

nately good and necessarily to be obeyed, is 
quite as mischievous as that of the Socialist at 
the other extreme, who looks on it as a distinct 
personality which has special duties it owes to 
him — is indeed a kind of teaching that is 
largely responsible for socialism, the obligation 
to support on the one side implying the obliga- 
tion to protect on the other. A remnant still 
exists of the old philosophy that it is the State 
that makes morality. For the divine right of 
kings we have substituted the divine right of 
congress. And as the pagan of other days 
took a piece of wood he had saved from the 
fire heap or the lumber yard and carved it with 
his knife into an idol which he fell down and 
worshiped as his god, so the citizen of to-day 
takes a piece from the timber of our common 
humanity and shapes him with his ballot into a 
legislator whose law he bows down to with a 
homage altogether different from what he would 
give it as the word of a man. It is an assump- 
tion that we need to get entirely rid of. The 
State is ourselves, what we are, and with only 
such authority as we choose to let it have. As 
Emerson says, " We ought to remember in deal- 
ing with it that its institutions are not ab- 
original, that they are not superior to the 
citizen, that every one of them was once the 
act of a single man, and that they are all imi- 
table, all alterable." There is no reason why 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 195 

a man should not join it and leave it as freely 
as he does a church or a temperance society ; no 
reason why, if he refuses to receive its protec- 
tion and partake of its benefits, he should be 
taxed for it, any more than when he declines 
to buy any other goods. It is toward this re- 
lation to it that all democracy, all civilization 
tends. And with the citizen thus its voluntary 
member there would be naturally the same ap- 
preciation of its value and responsibility for 
its conduct, and the same chance to act in it 
on principle, that there are now in all other 
voluntary associations. 

With equal emphasis evolution points to more 
differentiation in the legislative department of 
the State as a requisite for its better dealing 
with moral questions. A large part of its mis- 
takes and inefficiencies now arise from its try- 
ing to act on all its varied interests through 
only one set of men. With the complexities of 
our modern social life and the wide diversity 
of the matters to be attended to — coinage and 
crime, temperance and tariffs, Indians and im- 
ports, seals and silver — what can be more ab- 
surd than to expect one body of legislators to 
make laws intelligently on them all.? Different 
hands for different work is what is as much 
needed in the State as in any other workshop. 
If an Indian question is to be acted upon, the 
only way in which to have it done properly 



196 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

is by the election of men for it who have made 
a special study of the Indian situation ; if a 
temperance question, then of those who have 
given to temperance in all its bearings their 
life thought. So with all other matters re- 
quiring wide knowledge and nice discrimina- 
tion. Thirty years ago our country had bitter 
experience of what it was to wage a military 
war by acts of a general Congress, setting 
politicians who could manage a caucus to man- 
aging a campaign, and leaders who could 
fire the country's heart to being leaders who 
should fire its cannon. We need to do now 
in our war against wrong what we had to do 
then in our war against rebels — put its con- 
duct in the care of moral Grants and Sher- 
mans, have West Points at which to educate 
civilians as well as soldiers. It is this that is 
the real civil-service reform, the one that will 
bring law-makers within its scope, a hundred- 
fold more important than that which includes 
only law administrators. Then when a law 
has been formulated it ought in most cases to 
be referred back to the whole people for its 
final passage — they who ought, in the old 
New England town-meeting way, to be their 
own ultimate legislative body. It is a refer- 
ence which would give them a direct knowledge 
of the laws they are living under, a thing 
which in nine cases out of ten they are igno- 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 197 

rant of now, would be a union of the nation's 
select and common wisdom, the voice of reason 
and the voice of the people, that might with 
some justice be called the voice of God. And 
moral laws public opinion had helped so di- 
rectly to make, public opinion better than any 
policeman's club would help naturally to en- 
force. 

Summing up the conclusions reached, soci- 
ety's moral questions include all those which 
relate to how its members in their dealings with 
each other shall best be enabled to pro- 
mote the public good and to secure from it 
their own highest well-being. The right of 
any person to act on such questions is derived 
from the fact that he is not only an individual 
with his own conduct to attend to, but a part 
also of the social body, having interests that 
are affected by the conduct of others, and that 
his will and his work are the legitimate higher 
channels of that great indwelling power mak- 
ing for righteousness by which the whole uni- 
verse is moved. Politics and the moral method 
both have their place under evolution as agen- 
cies to be used in their settlement, the differ- 
ence between them being that the one is a stage 
farther along than the other, and that it works 
from within instead of from without. Each 
has its imperfections and limitations, each its 



198 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

special stage of social development to which it 
is best adapted ; and while moral principle is 
to be looked forward to as the ideal condition, 
political law is to be used whenever for the 
time being it will best promote the great end 
to be attained, just as in the education of a 
child outward precept is imposed upon him by 
parent and friend till he is able to act always 
from his own inner sense of right, the acting 
from his own sense of right being always kept 
in view as the end to be reached. There is no 
inconsistency between the two, no reason why 
both of them should not join hands, when the 
opportunity offers, in helping do their com- 
mon work. And the final tendency of evolu- 
tion here, as in so many other things, is not 
to accentuate the differences of its factors, 
not to give the one supremacy by the other's 
annihilation, but to fill each with something of 
the other's life and to unite them all on a 
higher plane and, in a completer whole, evolve 
the State into more freedom for the individ- 
ual, the individual into more voluntary associ- 
ations that, like the State, shall act through 
self-imposed law, and society at large into a 
completer yielding to that Divine Power 
within it which of itself makes for righteous- 
ness. As the audience of a country church 
one summer afternoon were laboriously strug- 



EVOLUTION AND POLITICS 199 

gling through their congregational hymn, the 
wheezy old organ with its poor player trying 
to lead, and several scores of voices each with 
its own distinct degree of success trying to 
follow, it chanced that Emma Abbott, the 
famous opera singer, dropped into the service, 
and suddenly a voice rich, sweet, powerful, 
and thrilling with an accent of soul no word 
can describe, broke in with them from among 
the pews. It did not hush the others, but 
quickened, inspired, strengthened, led them — 
swept the hundreds of straggling voices and 
the wheezy old organ itself, glad now to fol- 
low, into complete harmony with each other, 
into a capacity, also, that surprised them- 
selves ; and there went up to heaven out of 
them all a burst of reverential song such as 
the old church in all its eighty years of service 
had never echoed with before. And that is 
what the inward moving power of evolution, 
the voice of God in the soul of man, is tending 
to do with our wheezy old State organ and its 
political players, and with all the hundreds of 
voluntary reform tongues that now, strag- 
gling apart, are trying to deal with moral 
questions; it is tending not to hush them up, 
or take their place, but to quicken them into 
new strength, unfold them into new beauty, 
and blend them all together in a song that 



200 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

shall be worthy of its glorious theme — a song 
of the eternal Right that in all this vast world 
of ours shall not be marred with one discord- 
ant note of wrong. 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 

Radicalism is ordinarily supposed to con- 
cern itself entirely with the new, and to have 
little or nothing to do with the old. Its 
method of progress is thought to be the root- 
ing up and sweeping away of the institutions 
and ideas of the past with each changing age, 
and the planting in their place of others re- 
vealed directly out of the heavenly world or 
originating wholly in the minds of this world's 
reformers. Destruction, it is said, must nec- 
essarily precede construction ; the houses of 
the fathers be torn down, in order to make 
room for upbuilding those of the children; 
the handwriting of our predecessors be 
sponged off from the great social slate as the 
only way in which that of our own time can 
be made to stand forth distinct and clear. 
Advanced thinkers everywhere, but especially 
in religion, are apt to be impatient with men 
who cling in any degree to the doctrines, 
phrases, and forms of a bygone age, — 

" Loving those roots which feed us from the past^ 
And shored on every side 
With landmarks of hereditary thought,'* — 
201 



202 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

doubly so with those in their own ranks who 
hesitate about laying the ax at the root of 
each sacred tree, accusing them sometimes of 
trying to serve two incompatible masters, the 
god of tradition and the live spirit of reform. 
An historical faith is spoken of as a contra- 
diction of terms, the very essence of all faith, 
it is said, consisting in the soul's immediate 
consciousness of eternal realities ; and they 
would as soon attempt to live on last year's 
breathing as another age's taught religion. 
Even among those who, in some degree, re- 
spect and use the past, its truths are treated 
not as roots and seeds having their best place 
in its own soil, but as gems and coins to be 
brought forth and placed side by side with the 
treasures of the present. Conservatism is 
made only another name for preservation; 
progress conceived of as accretion and not 
growth, the adding of so many new things to 
so many old ones, and not as the life of the 
one fruiting itself forever in the forms of the 
other. 

A generation ago this philosophy of the old 
and new was the only possible one for ad- 
vanced thinkers to take. Their highest 
watchword then was necessarily revolution ; 
their only source of fresh truth, the undis- 
covered and unknown; their devoutest atti- 
tude, a face turned to the future rather than 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 203 

to the past ; and, as related to the conserva- 
tism of that day, they had inevitably to take 
the position of foes and to do largely the work 
of destructives. 

But, since then, the great science of evolu- 
tion has been discovered and taught ; and not 
the least striking and wonderful of its many 
influences is the new significance and value it 
has given to what is old in the world's treas- 
ures, and the new attitude it has compelled 
all really radical thinkers to take with refer- 
once to the past. It is usually looked upon 
as a very destructive doctrine, making sad 
havoc with the pet ideas of conservatism 
and upsetting all established science, philos- 
ophy, and religion. And so it is. But it is 
a force which cuts both ways, supersedes the 
past theories of radicalism just as completely 
as it does those of conservatism, and succors 
the advocates of tradition, an established 
church, and an historical religion even more 
than it does the friends of intuition, freedom, 
and the living now. Under its teachings, the 
past and present are found to have a direct 
organic relation with each other, like that of 
root and branches, seed and fruit; the divine 
method of progress to be neither the destruc- 
tion of the old to make room for the new, nor 
yet its preservation as the stock to which 
fresh gains are to be added, but its use as the 



204 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

base and means from which and through which 
to unfold forever a better new; the bygone 
ages found to be not dead things which have' 
done their work and that are valuable now 
only for the light of experience shining out 
of them through the uncertain media of his- 
tory, but the Josephs and Marys, older and 
younger, out of whose loins by the miracle 
of a greater incarnation are being born con- 
tinually the Saviours of to-day. It is a sci- 
ence which has preeminently that ear-mark 
of all great truths, the reconciliation on 
higher grounds of apparently incongruous 
half-truths, — lifts all religious students, 
both radicals and conservatives, upon a 
broader plane where to observe and into a 
new light with which to see. And as the sun- 
rise more than once in our Civil War revealed 
regiments which had been fiercely fighting 
each other in the dark as really on the one 
Union side and with the same patriotic cause 
at heart, so the dawn of this great luminous 
truth shows bodies of thinkers who have been 
striking madly at each other in the night of 
the past as on the same union side of the 
world's advance, and as toilers all for one 
eternal cause. 

Look at the illustrations of this organic 
relation between the two things found in the 
realms of nature and of natural progress. It 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 205 

was the original theory of geology that the 
earth had gone through a succession of cat- 
aclysms or convulsions, by which its different 
orders of minerals, plants, and animals, after 
existing upon it for long ages, had been sud- 
denly broken up and destroyed, leaving only 
their fossil remains in the buried strata ; and 
that then, each time, the Creator had made a 
fresh start, introducing by a direct act of his 
will new and improved agencies and species, 
and that in this way, step by step, he had ad- 
vanced to man and to the world as it has 
been for the last six thousand years, — a the- 
ory which embodies exactly the old idea of 
how all progress was made. But now it is 
known that one stratum of rock furnished the 
materials by the slow wearing down and mix- 
ing up of its elements to form another; that 
each species of animals and plants is the out- 
growth by reproduction and variation of all 
those which went before it ; and that the latest 
things produced out of the earth's treasury, 
while new considered as individuals, are, in 
their origin, substance, and deeper life, as old 
as nature, yea, perhaps, as God himself. The 
flower which blooms to-day has roots which 
go down through all the soils of the past ; 
the child which is born to-morrow, qualities 
which antedate the race. Before Abraham 
was, we all are. The ancient fire-mist is still 



a06 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

being worked over in our bones, the spirit 
which shaped it, perhaps, in our souls. The 
first spring which decked the earth blossoms 
in the last ; the first worm which crawled on 
it has ascended, as Emerson says, through all 
the spires of form to man ; and there was 
something reaching over from the primal sav- 
age, who is not yet really dead, that went to 
make a Plato, a Shakespeare, and a Jesus 
Christ. Never for a single moment has there 
been a wiping out of the slate and a beginning 
over again. The present condition of things 
all through, even in its newest fields, is an un- 
broken tradition of the past ; a consequent 
to which every antecedent has contributed a 
part ; a life which could not be except as 
it has for its pillars all the myriad skeletons 
ever made by death. In nature's progress, 
it is not destruction which precedes construc- 
tion, unless by accident, but construction that 
always comes first ; the new buds which are 
formed before the dropping of the old leaves ; 
the life of the children which is made sure of 
before the death of the fathers ; the Past for- 
ever which holds in its strong arms the 
infant Present. Nature, as a whole, is like a 
single tree. Its new seed is planted in the 
old dust. Its lifted blossom is possible only 
through its lowly root. The mellow fruit of 
its humanity hangs on the gnarled and un- 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 207 

couth limbs of its fossil brutes. Amid all 
the ravages of death, sweeping off individ- 
uals, nations, races, and species, its ancient 
stalk remains planted in the far-off spring of 
time, enwrapped with layers of fresh strength 
gathered from every blossom and every beast 
it has ever borne in the mighty past with 
which to bear new ones in the years to come. 
The most precious part of it is not the flowers 
and the fruit which it has on it this spring 
and this year, but the old, unsightly roots, 
trunk, and limbs of its bygone years so often 
despised, but in whose garnered juices are 
the possibilities of endless fruit and flow- 
ers. And every time a fresh growth appears 
upon it, whether it be of plants, animals, or 
men, it is still the one mighty householder 
bringing out of his treasures things new and 
old. 

Equally conspicuous, when the eyes are once 
opened to it, is this relation of the old and 
new in the realms of politics, reform, society, 
and civilization. There are indeed convul- 
sions and revolutions, winters of paralysis and 
springtime revivals, the disappearance of old 
forms and the manifestations of new ones with- 
out number, but no wiping out of the entire 
slate, no tearing up of the old roots, no house 
of the children which does not have in it very 
largely the lumber of the fathers. The war 



208 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

which preceded the formation of our Repub- 
lican government, though we call it a revolu- 
tion and glory in it as a new era in human 
affairs, was more properly an evolution, a new 
flower on a stalk already centuries old. The 
liberty which blossomed with petals of blood 
and flame at Bunker Hill and Yorktown had 
its roots in the battle grounds of Naseby and 
Marston Moor, Thermopylae and Marathon, 
had been fought for again and again by the 
sires of the very men who on our own soil 
were marshaled against it. Our famous con- 
stitution incorporated principles which Eng- 
land had been nursing for centuries, — was not 
a new creation, but the outgrowth of a seed 
which the storm of war had shaken from its 
old tree and blown across the waters to this 
fresh virgin soil; and without the habits of 
self-government and of submission to the will 
of the majority wrought into our Anglo- 
Saxon blood under English skies and during 
our extended colonial childhood, how long 
would our outward Republicanism have lasted? 
Yea, traced back in its longer pedigree, it 
will be found that all government is of one 
blood; that the newest democracy has pre- 
cious things in it which were nursed by the 
old tyrannies ; and that without a throne 
there never would have been a ballot box, with- 
out a Caesar never a Congress. 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 209 

All scientific discoveries, even evolution it- 
self, come by evolution ; that is, are made not 
by looking into the realm of the dim unknown, 
but with sharper eyes into facts and princi- 
ples already in the treasury of our race. The 
explorers of the new everywhere have to begin 
their investigations with conning over the 
mighty stores of the old. The civilized sci- 
ences, not less than the civilized races, have 
had their savage ancestry, — chemistry its al- 
chemy, astronomy its astrology, the find- 
ing of the philosopher's truth the searching 
for the philosopher's stone, — without which 
they could not be. The accepted theory of 
to-day is shaped, not more by its originator, 
than by all the rejected theories of yesterday. 
When Galileo looked through the Tuscan optic 
glass and discovered the mountains of the 
moon, the phases of Venus, and the satellites 
of Jupiter, it was not he alone who saw them, 
but, with his eyes, all the other upturned orbs 
which, in Chaldea and Egypt and, back of 
them, in the uncalendared night of the past, 
had ever stuc^ed stars. Honest thought, 
though married itself to error in one genera- 
tion, begets out of her a shining truth for 
the next. In the mathematics of progress, it 
is the negatives of failure, not less than the 
positives of success, which, multiplied to- 
gether, makes its mighty plus. And the stu- 



£10 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

dent of science, who should forget this law 
of dependence and argue that the best way 
to help it along would be to sponge the men- 
tal slate of himself, and of the world, free 
from all past attainments, would find the first 
other truth written there would be, " Thou 
art a fool." 

Society all through is not of the present 
alone, but of the mighty past ; it is a stalk like 
nature, whose roots go down into the heart of 
the first man that ever walked the earth ; is a 
result to which the farthest back as well as 
the farthest up have contributed their part. 
Out of their lowly caves the despised troglo- 
dytes reach silent hands to shape the fair Par- 
thenon, upbuild the majestic St. Peter's, and 
mold the luxurious mansions of our modern 
life. Amid the splendid charities and won- 
derful mechanical contrivances that are rais- 
ing the asylums and hospitals of our own 
time, the philosophic ear, listening through 
the spirit's subtler telephone, will hear the 
click still of rude stone hammers wielded be- 
fore Christ was even a Messianic dream, and 
by hands four fingers of which were red with 
blood. The wisdom of ancient Rome, not that 
of our living politicians alone, thank God, 
still makes the larger part of our laws. The 
domestic light which brightens up our homes 
has rays in it kindled on hearth-stones among 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 211 

far-ofF Scandinavian tribes. Behind the lit- 
tle bands of policemen, who guard our streets 
in the silent watches of the night, there is a 
great army of other unseen ones, marching 
to their posts each eve from all the ages since 
law and order came to men. When the youth 
and maiden whisper their first love to each 
other in the soft summer night, its sweetness, 
purity, and refinement seem to them all new, 
— a gift direct out of heaven, such as no 
mortal ever felt before. Yet in it are the 
cumulative pulse and thrill of what unnum- 
bered hearts now in their graves, whose throb- 
bings and fires have beaten and burned the 
coarseness of mere animal passion into its fine 
and lasting gold. The very words of love 
and of all man's daily speech, though they 
seem to spring fresh and warm from his own 
heart and lips, have in them the accent of all 
the speakers who have ever laden them with 
their joy and sorrow, since the first cry of 
pain and shout of laughter stirred the waves 
of air. It is the past of society everywhere 
which makes its present ; the developed Old 
which constitutes the shining New ; the rich 
and toiling Yesterdays which, forevermore, 
are leaving their wealth to the young To-day, 
as their child and heir. 

" The Present moves, attended 
With all the brave and excellent and fair 



212 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

That made the old time splendid. 
Whatever of true life there was of yore 

Along our veins is springing. 
For usj its martyrs die, its prophets soar, 

Its poets still are singing." 

And because our civilization is not yet per- 
fect, because evils of many kinds are yet min- 
gled with its good, who can think it would be 
a true philosophy to tear it down and begin 
anew.f^ Its most ungainly parts, ideas and 
institutions which, to the superficial view, 
stand directly in the way of progress, and 
which, sometimes, a superficial reform would 
gladly get rid of, are often its most precious 
inheritance, — roots crooked and gnarled, it 
may be, but which concentrate in themselves 
all the juices of the past, and on which alone 
can grow the flower of the future. There is 
no ideal heaven, no factory of art or reason, 
no invention of man, out of which can come 
an improved social state so surely as out of 
this world's treasured past. Whether or not 
we believe with Pope that whatever is is right, 
we must believe that whatever is is the best 
that could have been made, up to this present 
hour. All the wisdom of God and all the work 
of all the ages have gone into its production; 
yea, are in it now. And the reformer's true 
friends and helpers are not only the living re- 
cruits, the fresh young hearts that gather 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 213 

around his standard, but the myriads of the 
mighty dead mingled with them, and able now 
not less than of old to carry on their work; 
the most tremendous force at his command, 
not the new drops of spiritual influence which 
are now falling from heaven, precious as they 
are, but the great stream of what is old, the 
cumulative moral impetus of all the ages, be- 
ginning in the far-off mountain peaks of his- 
tory, gathering momentum and volume from 
all the countless human hearts along its way, 
and, mingled with the life of our time, sweep- 
ing the social craft with irresistible might 
onward to its heavenly port. 

It is a relation that with equal certainty 
holds good in religion and in all religious life 
and truth. It is indeed the case that all re- 
ligions claim that in their growth, if nowhere 
else, this organic relation between the old and 
new has been broken; claim that their 
truths, if no others, have had a supernatural 
origin and a miraculous witness ; claim that 
their new, if that of nothing besides, was not 
derived from any old, but interpolated into 
human experience from beyond nature and ad- 
vanced on its way by the breath and nurture 
of another world. But the more thoroughly 
their rise and history are studied, the more 
evident it becomes that they are of divine 
birth only in the same way as all other bless- 



214 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

ings ; that all which is in them at any one time 
can be accounted for as the logical unfolding 
of what was in them before ; and that, how- 
ever much they are nourished and quickened 
by the spirit of God, it is by his spirit in this 
world and not from beyond it, and by its act- 
ing on the past as the sunshine and the air do 
on the growing tree, and not by its own energy 
alone. 

Look at Christianity as a good example of 
this relation. With all the emphasis which 
is laid on its miraculous element, its New Tes- 
tament form, according to the testimony of 
its own writers, came out of Judaism, — not, 
indeed, as a mere continuance of the older 
faith, but as a child out of its mother, its 
teacher being himself of Jewish birth, its light 
a part of that true light which lighteth every 
man which cometh into the world, and its mis- 
sion not the destruction, but the fulfilment of 
the law and the prophets. Judaism by the 
same process came out of the religions of 
Egypt and Persia and the far-off East, — 
Sinai with its thunders and all the long super- 
naturalism of Jewish history being but the po- 
etic drapery of a natural evolution; and these 
religions in their turn out of others still far- 
ther back, which amid the attrition of the 
ages have now as little left of their original 
form as the soil beneath them has of its prim- 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 215 

itive rock. In each case, however, there was 
not a wiping out of the old faith and the put- 
ting in its place of a new and strange revela- 
tion any more than in nature a destruction of 
the old species of animals and plants and the 
fresh creation of others, but a natural de- 
velopment of the one out of the other, all 
that was richest and best in the old passing 
over each time into the new. And, in each 
case, the old was the necessary forerunner to 
prepare the way for the new, and its work 
the absolute condition on which alone it was 
possible for the new to come. Without a 
Moses and the prophets there never could have 
been a Jesus and the apostles, — this the real 
sense in which they testify of him and predict 
his coming, as the animals by their very forms 
predict the coming man ages before his ap- 
pearance, — without the Law, never the Gos- 
pel; without the worship at Gerizim and Jeru- 
salem, never that in spirit and truth ; and with- 
out the heathen religions and the old nature 
faiths, bloody, grim, and superstitious, never 
either Law or Gospel, Moses or Messiah. 

But the process did not end with the com- 
ing of Christianity. Jesus himself calls his 
word only the seed. What a wealth of mean- 
ing in that one simple term ! what a revelation 
of the true nature of his gospel! what a testi- 
mony beyond all miracle to his own transcend- 



216 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

ent fitness for leadership ! Its utterance an- 
ticipated eighteen hundred years of the 
world's growth. It contains Darwin and 
Spencer, evolution and the nineteenth century. 
And it was not a chance word, not a happy 
hit, but the central truth of his religious phi- 
losophy ; the idea under the guidance of which 
he did his work; the explanation of why he 
wrote no books, organized no church, pro- 
mulgated no creed ; the principle on whose cor- 
rectness he staked the whole success of his life 
and ministry. 

It is this fact of its seed nature, this ten- 
dency of its old to unfold forevermore into 
the new, — often lost sight of alike by its de- 
fenders and its doubters, — which solves the 
chief part of all the difficulties about it, drawn 
from its crudeness, imperfections, and wide di- 
versities. Its form in the New Testament, so 
often asserted and assailed as its only real 
truth, is not Christianity itself, any more than 
the acorn is the oak, or the troglodyte hu- 
manity. Neither is Catholicism, or Ortho- 
doxy, or Unitarianism, or Episcopacy, or any 
other system of truth its whole. They are 
all but the phases through which it is grow- 
ing, — all but strata and species in the geology 
of truth, destined like those of nature to die 
out and be buried up. And yet, in the larger 
view, they are all parts of it, all essential to 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 217 

the future of itself and the world, all pro- 
ducers the old of the new. Without a Jesus 
there would have been no Luther, Wesley, 
Channing, and Parker; without Catholicism 
and Orthodoxy, no Protestantism and Uni- 
tarianism; without all the religions of the 
past, heathen and Christian, no Liberalism 
anywhere to-day. The freest church on earth 
in our time has roots which go down for its 
nurture amid the racks and pincers of the In- 
quisition. The sweet juices which are blossom- 
ing now in so many faiths all about us were 
drawn up a part of the way through the veins 
of Turretin, Augustine, and grim old Calvin, 
— yea, received from them a part of their 
elaboration; and, under the platform even of 
Free Religion itself, if a plummet were 
dropped far enough, an altar would be found 
with a human victim on it just as surely as 
under that of the crudest superstition; and, 
what is more, it would be found that an echo 
of his groans goes to make the sweetness of 
our songs. 

But, if evolution, as thus applied to religion 
and especially to Christianity, conflicts with 
and undermines its supernatural and miracu- 
lous character, and so favors radicalism, it 
also confirms and upholds it tenfold more on 
its natural and historical side, and so gives 
the profoundest aid and comfort to its con- 



218 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

servative interests. It shows beyond all pos- 
sible question that it is not an invention, not a 
manufacture, not something which has been 
imposed on the world by the cunning of priests 
or the fancy of philosophers, but a normal and 
legitimate growth. A part of nature, it must 
share with all its other parts — with the flow- 
ers, the sunshine, and the solid earth itself — 
our faith in nature. Even in its newest, latest 
forms, it has all the uncounted ages as its 
foundation, witnesses, and proof. The super- 
stitions and crudities out of which it has come, 
though recognized, as indeed they must be, as 
the old things in its treasury, are no more an 
argument against it than man's original sav- 
agery and barbarism are against civilization, 
— are in fact, according to evolution itself, the 
only road along which its truths could come. 
It enables it to stand before science not as an 
alien, supplicating for a place in which to live, 
but as one of the original tenants of its own 
soil, having all the rights of a first settler. 
And what evolution has thus brought forth, 
nourished, and made a part of itself, it surely 
will not do for any loyal disciple of evolution 
to cast out as unworthy of his belief. 

Is there not, also, in this fact of its being 
so strongly rooted in the soil of the past the 
strongest possible pledge for its continuance 
in the future? There are some progressive 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 219 

thinkers who prophesy that religion is about 
to die out ; some timid believers who fear that 
without a new revelation from heaven it will ; 
some who see in science its deadly foe, and in 
evolution the special phase of science which is 
to give it the final stroke. Vain hopes, vainer 
fears ! The tree whose tap-root goes down 
through all generations into the heart of the 
first man who ever trod the earth is not to be 
blown down by any breeze which does not blow 
down human nature itself ; the movement which 
has been gaining momentum through all the 
human ages, not to be stopped by any force 
less mighty than what stops life everywhere. 
Religion, beyond question, will change in the 
future, as it has in the past, will be as different 
six thousand years ahead from what it is now 
as it was six thousand years ago from its form 
to-day; but it will be the change of growth 
and not decay, the change from more to more 
and not from less to less. The real prophet 
of religion, the one in comparison with which 
the most glowing predictors of the Hebrew 
(Scriptures are timid, short-sighted guessers, 
is this very science so fought and feared now 
by some of the churches. It is the old under 
its light which contains the new ; its vast age 
— such is the paradox — which gives the assur- 
ance of its continued youth ; its conservative 
element, so completely do the two things har- 



^20 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

monize, which constitutes the root on which 
blossoms for all the future the radical's divin- 
est hope. So long as man evolves, religion 
will. As the first relic of human building 
found on earth is an altar, so will be the last. 
And its final truth, transcending all men now 
can possibly conceive of, will be not a new rev- 
elation out of heaven, but a legitimate out- 
growth of its own past, something to which all 
the truths, ay, and all the errors of all the 
ages, shall have contributed a part ; something 
to which every faith and worship, not except- 
ing the lowest, crudest, and most horrible in 
the far-off geologic ages, shall have led up as 
the necessary steps, — the whole, indeed, 

" The world's great altar stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God." 

Finally, it is a relation which suggests the 
true method by which the work of religious 
progress needs consciously to be carried on 
in our own day. It is not by cutting loose, 
even on the part of the most radical thinkers, 
from Christianity, or from any of the great 
historic religions, and rubbing them out from 
the world's slate; not by giving up men's Bi- 
bles, traditions, and churches, and putting in 
their place some wholly new truth, new organi- 
zation, and new cultus derived from science or 
reason or the spirit world, but by holding fast 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 221 

to these as the soil and root from which under 
the eternal sunshine to have religion grow be- 
yond them, being forever upheld by the one 
and nourished by the other. I know how con- 
trary this philosophy is to the common idea; 
know how terribly the world's traditions and 
inherited customs seem sometimes to stand in 
the way of its progress ; know from experi- 
ence how powerfully old memories and old 
faiths drag down on the soul in its upward 
reaches ; know how prone many of us are to 
look at the religious past as inevitably the fet- 
ter and chain of the religious present. But it 
is only a superficial view. The past of re- 
ligion, the same as of all other things, is the 
great mother breast which holds the nourish- 
ment of humanity's present and future; tra- 
dition, the lifted platform only by standing on 
which can the builder lay new courses along 
the ever-rising temple of truth; the memories 
of religion reaching back into the buried cen- 
turies, the mines where alone the coal can be 
quarried for driving its engines up the steeps 
of progress and on into the fair and sunny 
fields of its larger hope. It is construction, 
the same here as in nature, which must pre- 
cede destruction; the new buds that must be 
formed before the dropping of the old leaves ; 
the larger faith that must anticipate the weak- 
ening doubt. An historical religion, instead 



22^ ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

of being a contradiction of terms, is really 
the only religion which is possible- What 
Lowell says of the individual is equally true 
of the race : — 

" The bird I hear sings not from yonder elm; 
But the flown ecstasy my childhood heard 
Is vocal in my mind^ renewed by him, 
Haply made sweeter by the accumulate thrill 
That threads my undivided life, and steals 
A pathos from the years and graves between.'* 

A person might as well cut the new leaves 
and flowers of a tree off^ from its old limbs and 
expect them, when exposed to the sunshine, to 
remain fresh and bear fruit, as sever the ad- 
vanced religious life of the present from the 
doctrines and institutions of the historic past, 
with the hope that, exposed only to the light 
of our time, it will grow and ripen. Continu- 
ous tradition and continuous inspiration, the 
one the body of the great world tree ; the other 
its surrounding light and air, — these are 
equally the factors of progress. Radicalism 
under the reign of evolution becomes not a lost 
word, but one with a deeper significance than 
before; means not a tearing up, but a holding 
on to the roots of things ; conservatism, not an 
empty name, but a true and divine instinct, a 
clinging to the past, not to keep its form un- 
changed, but as the root to be unfolded into 



EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS 223 

an ever larger future. And the evolutionist in 
religion, to be consistent with his own faith, 
must be in this sense both a radical and con- 
servative ; must do what, with many thought- 
less people, makes him seem only a trimmer and 
time-server, but which really is the extreme of 
independence and courage, — reach forth with 
his welcome evermore for new light and truth; 
yet, as the very means of doing so, must honor 
and use the past, draw his nurture from old 
Bibles, old exemplars, and old churches, and 
have roots of his being which, with some of 
their tendrils, reach down to the very dust of 
the world's primal beliefs ; in short, must be, 
as Jesus proclaimed centuries ago, the house- 
holder which bringeth forth out of his treas- 
ures things new and old, and, as Lowell has 
echoed in our own time, the voyager who 

" With the old sextant of the fathers' creed 
Shapes his courses by new risen stars." 



VI 

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 

When Darwin's and Spencer's doctrine of 
Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fit- 
test was first set forth — two names, as you 
know, for essentially the same thing — its 
novelty and philosophic aptness and the dis- 
cussions it provoked as to its theological bear- 
ings, drew attention away for awhile from its 
deeper moral implications. But now that its 
truth has been in a measure established and 
leisure found for examining more carefully the 
prize so brilliantly won, the glow of delight ex- 
cited by its scientific beauty has gradually 
given place to a feeling of deep depression 
over its awful destructiveness and its^ ap- 
parent evidence of an absolute disregard in 
nature of all ethical and humanitarian prin- 
ciples. It lets us into the world's workshop 
as no other discovery has ever done; but re- 
veals its magnificent walls more stained with 
blood than was ever any wild beast's cave; 
gives us a hero to worship such as no other 
kingdom ever saw, but one with a Cyclopean 

greatness that even a Carlyle would hardly 

224 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY S25 

offer incense to ; takes life on from its unor- 
ganized protoplasm to its Richmond of civili- 
zation, as no other principle ever has, but does 
it Grant-like through a wilderness where its 
uncounted armies are heaped upon battle-fields 
of uncounted slaughter. Even such an advo- 
cate of its truth as Mr. Huxley can see in it 
no ethical or philanthropic import. " The 
cosmical process," he says, " has no sort of 
relation to moral ends," is rather " the head- 
quarters of the enemy of the ethical nature." 
And in its attitude especially to the poor and 
weak its contrast with Christian selection is so 
great as to give, with many persons, new 
strength to the argument that Christianity 
could not have come from nature and must, 
therefore, be a supernatural religion. 

Before giving it up, however, as utterly 
hopeless for these higher things, it is well to 
remember that one of the most striking char- 
acteristics of evolution, as exhibited in other 
fields, is its habit of producing its richest 
fruits up above from what lower down are its 
most unpromising stems — unity from differ- 
entiations, the sky-seeking flower from the 
earth-seeking root, the rattlesnake's tail and 
Plato's skull from the same vertebrate skeleton, 
and Jephtha's sacrifice and that of Jesus from 
one religious sentiment. The real thing needed 
for getting out of the moral difficulties into 



226 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

which at first it so thickly plunges us is not 
less of it but more; the word of the Lord it 
speaks to the Moseses and peoples who in 
starting out of their old Egypt for a better 
land are confronted first of all with its Red 
Sea, " Go Forward." And obeying such a 
command, I want to take this doctrine of the 
survival of the fittest, so terrible in its be- 
ginnings, and try whether following it right 
through its blood-red seas will not lead us 
now, as of old, to a Canaan flowing with' all 
the milk and honey of religion's and philan- 
thropy's most loving care for the unfit poor 
and weak. 

Starting with its operations in the physical 
world, it means there, beyond question, the 
preservation of only those animals and plants 
in each species and of only those species and 
genera in the organic world as a whole, which 
without any regard to their ethical character, 
excel in such qualities, whether of size or small- 
ness, skill or stupidity, courage or cowardice, 
generosity or meanness, often the worst ones 
even physically, as best fit them for their en- 
vironment; and the crushing out and crowd- 
ing out, without any mercy or honor or justice, 
of all their unfit brethren. Nature provides 
herself with plenty of material to select from 
by having her creatures produce an immense 
number of offspring, more than are needed or 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 227 

able to grow up — is a mighty hunter who 
loads her gun not with a single ball, making 
everything depend on her accuracy in firing 
that — which was the old idea of Providence 
— but with a multitude of small shot, many 
more than she wants to hit the mark, so many 
that if they all did hit it, there would be no 
mark left, intending only two or three to take 
effect — which is the modern, scientific idea of 
Providence. Her shot are seeds, eggs, chil- 
dren, species, nations, possibly worlds. And 
it is the tests they are put to in reaching the 
mark of fitness which make her famous strug- 
gle for existence and constitute what is figura- 
tively known as natural selection. 

It is a struggle in which really the first 
round takes place before birth. Only the 
strongest and most attractive males are al- 
lowed to become parents. The whole vege- 
table world is an Oklahoma into which seeds 
carried on all manner of vehicles are vying 
with each other to get corner lots and promis- 
ing sites on which to plant themselves. With 
eggs a favorite diet the world over, it is only 
those which get shielded and sheltered by the 
shrewdest devices that escape tongue and bill 
and boiler. Of the myriad germs which are 
called up to the gates of life in viviparous 
animals how few are chosen to pass through 
them into actual existence! The whole em- 



228 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

bryonic world is a battle of the pigmies 
against the giants, a battle in which the odds 
are so great it seems a wonder that any of the 
little folks survive even to the extent of get- 
ting born. 

Victors in this preliminary contest, the out- 
ward elements, — heat, cold, moisture, dryness, 
earth, sky and the like, constituting the very 
home into which they are born, these fall upon 
them with their tests, giving a welcome and 
shelter only to those which can withstand their 
onslaughts, and giving to their weaker com- 
rades sooner or later only a grave. The num- 
bers perishing in this way even after they have 
reached maturity are enormous. Darwin es- 
timated that the cold winter of 1854-5 de- 
stroyed in his own estate four-fifths of all its 
birds. With no extra wraps to put on and no 
warm fires to get before, every change of 
climate which affects man, affects the feeble 
among animals a vast deal more. Fifteen 
thousand hides were sent East a while ago on a 
single freight train, taken from the cattle out 
on a Western prairie that had died in one of 
its blizzards. Who shall count the frail mos- 
quitoes and the aged flies that have their song 
hushed forever with the first autumn frost .^^ 
Even the little tough, grip-making bacteria, 
resisting all the devices of man to prove their 
unfitness to survive, seem to have been com- 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 229 

pelled by the past winter's thermometric hard 
times to join the ranks of the unemployed. 
And going back to the geologic ages, we find 
that not only individuals, but whole species 
and genera both of animals and plants have 
been killed off in a like manner by their ever 
changing elemental environments. So far as 
Nature is God it is all fiction that she tempers 
the wind to the shorn lamb. She tempers it 
to the lamb which is not shorn, provides won- 
derfully for the well and strong of her chil- 
dren, provides well for the weakest and small- 
est so long as they are well and fit ; but she has 
nothing which corresponds with human care 
for any of them, large or small, when they are 
hurt and sick, — never folds the little suffering 
bird in her loving arms, never makes any warm 
gruel for the chilled-through rhinoceros and 
tiger, has no soothing syrup for the restless 
cubs of the distracted wolf and bear, provides 
no surgeon for the broken-limbed deer and 
bone-choked fishhawk, and builds no asylums 
for consumptive lilies, mashed mosquitoes, and 
aged sharks. 

It is pitiable sometimes to see how little her 
creatures expect such a thing from any one as 
disinterested, individual kindness. Visiting an 
unused room in my Ipswich home awhile ago, I 
noticed that a solitary bird driven from its 
flock apparently because of its feebleness, had 



230 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

been in the habit of creeping for shelter at 
night between the window pane and the closed 
half of the window blind. Seeing how the bit- 
ter wind was whistling through the open slats 
and remembering my own sensitiveness to 
drafts even inside the room, I was moved altru- 
istically to fit a stray shingle over the open 
space so as in some measure to break off the 
wind. The little creature with the evening 
shadows came as usual to the sill, peered at the 
improvement on this side and that, with evi- 
dent surprise, and then, concluding apparently 
that it was too good to be true otherwise than 
as a trap, flew away into the night shadows, 
preferring their certainty to any, even clerical, 
Greeks bearing gifts. 

The care which nature does take of them is 
itself a sifting process, what are blessings to 
the strong being banes to the weak. Every 
farmer's boy who has tried to raise chickens, 
has noticed how the mother hen, as soon as 
they are hatched, begins leading them for food 
through the wet June grass and off, on long 
journeys such as only the strongest can stand, 
and that with all her diligence and self-sacri- 
fice in providing for their wants as a whole, 
scratching the earth for their meat, covering 
them with her wings from the cold, and de- 
fending them from foes at the risk of her life, 
she herself kicks over the foolish ones which get 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 231 

in her way as ruthlessly as she does the clods 
their food is among. Nature is such a hen. 
The food of her creatures is always in some 
kind of June grass. She leads them off in mi- 
grations where even her wild geese grow weary, 
and her grasshoppers are their own burden. 
And the very suns and showers which scratch 
the earth so wonderfully for their sustenance, 
kick over into its dust the witless ones which 
get in their way. 

Nor is any exception made in the case of 
her human children. Three-fourths of them 
die of her blows before they are five years old- 
She wades with her boys into green apples and 
snow water ponds, and with the girls into slate 
pencils and corsets and colored candy. 
" Don't strike him when he is down," is the 
rule enforced in even the most brutal prize 
rings ; but in the struggle for existence it is 
when a man by reason of some weakness or 
misfortune gets down, that she rains upon him 
her fiercest blows. Nero used to select his vic- 
tims for the wild beast conflicts of the amphi- 
theater by taking all from a file of prisoners 
marching before him who came between two 
bald heads. Nature, fortunately for some of 
us, is not so particular about the bald heads, 
but, if she sees a person having anything the 
matter with his lungs, or liver, or stomach, or 
heart, he is handed over with equal indifference 



ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

to her fiercer, elemental wild beasts. The old 
Burial Ground at Plymouth, into which one- 
half of the Mayflower's passengers were car- 
ried their first New England winter, is a 
witness to the rigor with which her sifting. proc- 
ess is applied in finding out of man's migra- 
tions, the fit founders of a new nation. And 
the earth is everywhere full of graves warning 
her human broods who wish to survive, that it 
will not do for them, any more than for her 
brute ones, to get in the way of those mighty 
legs of hers, the earthquake, tornado, thunder- 
bolt, with which she is scratching for them the 
earth's deeper soil. 

Escaping the elements, however, does not 
end their struggle. Her scratching, vigorous 
as it is, supplies them with only a fraction of 
their needed food. The greater part of it 
they have to get out of each other'^ bodies ; 
and that, too, by a system of " mutual mur- 
der " arising not through a fall from Eden, 
but instituted to begin with as a fundamental 
principle of the organic world, by which alone 
life can exist. 

*' Then marked he 
How the lizard fed on ants, and snake on him, 
And kite on both ; and how the fish hawk 
Robbed the fish tiger of that which it had seized, — 
The strike chasing the bulbul, which did chase 
The jeweled butterflies till everywhere 
Each slew a slayer and itself was slain." 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 233 

Several years ago, before I knew as a Darwin- 
ian that the fish is my elder brother, and that 
piscicide is no more justifiable as sport than 
homicide, I caught a cod, in the stomach of 
which, on dressing it, I found a pollock, in the 
pollock a young lobster, and in the lobster sev- 
eral fine protozoa, all fresh. It was a good 
representation of the whole organic world. 
Its highest beings holding in them as food 
everything down to the protozoa, are a genu- 
ine " codfish aristocracy." And in the strug- 
gle to see which shall be the eater and which 
the eaten, the well fitted not only get the prize 
sought for, but get with it as side dishes all 
their weak and witless competitors. Some of 
you may remember one of Punches famous car- 
toons some thirty years ago, entitled " Mis- 
placed Sj^mpathy," in which a pious mother 
who has taken her heedless Sunday-school boy 
to a picture gallery to be impressed with a 
painting of Daniel and his companions in the 
lions' den, is horrified by his exclaiming, " O 
mother, mother, see that poor little lion down 
there in the corner ; he won't get any ! " I 
have always had a great respect for that boy. 
He was evidently a true lover of animals, 
thought vastly more of them than of any old 
Bible prophets, and became afterwards, I 
doubt not, a genuine member of some Anti- 
cruelty Society. But Nature is no such boy. 



^34 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

What she is concerned for is not lest the poor 
little lions in a corner should not get a share 
of her Daniels, but that the fierce big ones 
should get them all. She has not only too 
much compan}^ at her table, as the Hebrew 
host explained the difficulty in his case, but 
too few chairs and too little food, so she ekes 
out its scantiness by setting the guests to eat 
each other up. It is indeed 

" A rage to live^ which makes all living strife." 

Then while their struggle is bad enough even 
in the best of seasons, it is aggravated by 
drouths and famines ever and anon into 
scenes of unspeakable horror, as for instance 
during the dry seasons of Central Africa 
when all the animals of the country for miles 
around, driven by their intolerable thirst, come 
to the few stagnant pools here and there into 
which what little water there is has sunk, the 
larger and fiercer ones taking possession of 
them entirely and lying in wait for the others, 
— huge hippopotami wallowing in their depths, 
long glittering snakes reaching out over their 
surface from the trees, ferocious beasts of 
prey watching with fiendish shrewdness their 
every avenue of approach, and on the outer 
rim rabbits, antelope, deer, scores of weak 
herbivorous creatures, looking with longing 
eyes and parched tongues for a chance to get 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 235 

one sip of their black, slimy, putrid, yet how 
precious drops, and having to choose at last 
between the ferocity of sharpened teeth and 
the fierceness of desert sands. 

So with man : a large part of his struggle in 
all ages has been for the means of life, air, 
light, water, food, even ground; a large part 
of his social differentiations those between the 
big lions with a plenty of Daniels to eat and 
the poor little ones doT\Ti in a corner with 
hardly a Daniel's bones to pick — on the one 
side Astors, Goulds, Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, 
millionaires tenfold over, on the other mil- 
lions without a mill ; on the one side corpora- 
tions and coal mines, on the other families and 
freezing. And ever and anon there comes 
along some great financial drouth in which eyes 
as thirsty as those of the desert deer look on 
pools of wealth, some of them wallowed in by 
creatures as foul and circled around by teeth 
as sharp as those of the African waste. Men 
complain sometimes of the Church, the State, 
the whole social fabric as responsible for these 
awful inequalities, — think, perhaps, with 
Rousseau, that if society were only abolished 
and everything left to nature, everything 
would be equality and peace. Delusive 
thought ! The trouble is that the original 
source of these inequalities and hardships is 
not Church or State or Society, but nature 



236 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

herself. Poverty, cold, hunger, are a part of 
her ways for sifting out the poor, cold, 
hungry. And to go back to her primitive 
reign would be only to go back from the fe- 
rocity of cities to the ferocity of desert sands. 
Then, worse from the moral standpoint than 
even their struggle with each other for food, 
is the tendency of animals to war against those 
in their own ranks which are simply different 
from themselves, and to do so especially against 
such as are disabled and weak, the object be- 
ing apparently only to assert their superior- 
ity. If there is a lame or sick chicken in the 
brood, or a stray one from another nest, 
everybody has noticed how the strong and at- 
home ones will peck at the unfortunates till 
they are either killed or driven away. " When 
I was a girl," said a lady, " and now and then 
got into little childish squabbles with brothers 
and sisters, I used to have quoted to me Dr. 
Watts's familiar hymn, ' Birds in their little 
nests agree,' to my shame and confusion. But 
after trying in later years to raise a brood of 
canaries and seeing how readily they made 
each other a funeral, — especially after leaving 
four of them in a cage one Sunday while I 
went to church, and finding on my return three 
hanging by their heads out of the wires, exe- 
cuted by their own brother, I began to think 
that bird nature was not after all so very 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 237 

much better than human nature." One of the 
most pathetic sights the animal world affords 
is its wounded members trying to get away 
from the well ones, even of their own species, 
to suffer and die alone — monkeys who carry 
off their disabled comrades from the battle- 
field, anthropoids, therefore, in something 
more than bodily form, being almost the only 
exception. It is notorious that no two roosters 
or bulls can be put together in the same lo- 
cality without a fight simply to determine 
which of them is smartest ; and no matter what 
the affections lavished upon them beforehand, 
there is not a hen or a cow which does not 
turn from the beaten one as promptly as ever 
a society belle did from a poverty-stricken 
beau. 

Nor is it a kind of struggle which is left 
behind when nature comes to man. What are 
nine-tenths of the world's great historic wars 
but the fights of its larger barnyard roosters 
to see which is smartest .^^ What the huge 
armaments all the governments of Europe are 
sporting to-day but the spurs to try sometime 
again the old question which of them shall crow 
the loudest? Big nations as regards little 
ones are all bullies, our own no exception, as 
witness its dealings with Mexico, Chili and 
the Indians. How ready all the different so- 
cial classes are to set their feet on the necks 



2S8 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

of the ones that are in any way below them! 
What are the competitions of the business 
world but a crowding of the weak to the wall 
as mercilessly as any that ever ran with 
blood? If a man gets a new idea, or a woman 
a dress out of style, who does not know that 
they are pecked at and driven off by themselves 
exactly as a bird is with a new feather, or a 
beast with a strange form? And even in the 
church what are the martyrdoms, persecutions, 
anathemas and rivalries of sect against sect, 
things of which in all ages it has been so fear- 
fully full, but the efforts of the strong to 
crush out what to them have been its unfit weak? 

Such are the various ways by which natural 
selection is carried on. 

Turning now to Christianity, Christianity 
not as an institution half realized, but as an 
ideal and aim, how transcendently different 
from all this is the new principle, new atmos- 
phere, with which the inquirer is at once 
brought in contact ! Its fundamental idea, as 
Mr. Huxley says, is beyond question exactly 
the opposite of that on which physical nature 
is carried on — is love, not hate, self-sacrifice 
rather than selfishness, and preeminently car- 
ing for the weak, poor, sick, unfit, instead of 
crushing them out. Its founder declares ex- 
plicitly that he came to seek and save that 
which is lost ; that to love thy neighbor as thy- 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 239 

self, the wounded man everywhere being the 
neighbor, is one of the two greatest command- 
ments ; that whosoever shall give a cup of cold 
water only to one of these little ones shall in 
no wise lose his reward, and that he who is 
least among you shall be greatest. It was the 
poor, lame, halt, blind, that were invited es- 
pecially to his gospel supper ; the sick and sin- 
ful that his life was spent in healing, not 
crushing out. And in the same spirit his 
great Apostle declares that not many wise, not 
many mighty, not many noble were called to 
be his followers, but the foolish things to con- 
found the wise, and the weak things to con- 
found the mighty, and the base and despised 
things and the things which are not to bring 
to naught the things which are. Then with 
and by itself, in spite of all its alliances with 
pride and power, and all its subserviences to 
wealth and fashion, it is historically along this 
line and among this material that for 1800 
years it has won its victories and done its work. 
It has built hospitals for the sick, opened 
churches for the sinful, scattered bread to the 
hungry, demanded freedom for the slave, 
championed the cause of the poor, and lifted 
up to a new level the weak and despised — has 
had a kind word even for animals themselves, 
recognized their rights, denounced cruelty in 
their treatment, established societies, news- 



240 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

papers, laws for their protection. And in the 
final building up of its kingdom its principle 
is to work into it every weakest, wickedest, 
meanest, poorest, unfittest soul, rejected of na- 
ture and despised of men, there is on the face 
of the earth. 

How now, with this immensity of difference, 
this apparent utter antagonism between them, 
are tliese two things made under evolution the 
gracious parts of one majestic whole, and in 
the larger cosmic process the natural out- 
growths, one through the other, of a common 
love-planted root? 

The first step of the answer is to recognize 
the adaptation of each agency to its own es- 
pecial part of the work. Looked at as simply 
the means for attaining what is physically best, 
and for laying at least the foundation of what 
is morally best, there is no difficulty in seeing, 
even with Christian eyes, that the principle of 
the survival of the fittest through a struggle 
for existence is one of immense practical 
wisdom. If a man is going to build a first- 
class house, he naturally puts his fittest timbers 
into its walls and his unfit ones into its waste. 
Every farmer aiming to improve his cattle and 
corn, has to pick out the most perfect of them 
to breed from and the others for his table and 
common work. And in all wars, wars for 
liberty and right as well as for tyranny and 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 241 

wrong, the general who wants to win victories 
enlists in his army not weak and sickly men, 
saints though they be, but the soundest and 
toughest ones the land affords, without asking 
for their standing in the church. So when 
nature wanted to build a first-class universe, 
improve her original protoplasmic cattle and 
corn, and win victories for her great final 
cause, how could she do otherwise than act on 
the same principle? Suppose that in her phy- 
sical realm the opposite course had been 
adopted — that of preserving the sick and 
weak, what would have been the result? We 
have tried it to some extent with human be- 
ings, have for centuries been keeping alive the 
lame, halt, poor, blind, thousands of persons 
whom nature at a very early date would have 
put in graves ; and the answer is — society 
overrun with tramps, the dangerous and crimi^ 
nal classes more numerous than ever before, 
and the unemployed poor mounting up into the 
hundred thousands. And if nature had been 
doing the same through her million centuries, 
how many more than now would have been, not 
her human, but her sub-human darkest Lon- 
dons — her animal tramps, her Juke fishes, her 
sickly cornfields and her unemployed vegetable 
poor! Call it mercy to the weak and poor 
themselves to have them saved, what is it to 
their descendants, what lesser cruelty to have 



242 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

the myriad offspring of a crippled creature 
suffer and live than to have the one creature 
itself suffer and die? A well managed saw- 
mill is run by its waste, run by using its slabs 
and sawdust, valueless themselves for lumber, 
as the engine fuel with which to turn out its 
straight and beautiful sticks. Nature's life- 
mill, in its system of having the weak eaten by 
the strong, is only acting on the same economic 
principle — utilizing its slab-animals in pro- 
ducing its straight and smooth organic timber. 
And what are their struggles with each other, 
and with the elements to get their food, but 
one of the factors in developing their strength, 
the exercise as needful for species and genera 
as it is for muscles and minds .^ Suppose that 
all of them had been so amply provided with 
sustenance that there would have been no need 
of their struggling for it, what would have 
been the result.? The succulina has answered 
— a creature beginning life well organized, but 
which after fastening itself as a parasite on 
the hermit crab, where it gets safety and sup- 
port without effort of its own, loses its higher 
organs and degenerates into a mere jelly-filled 
sack. Without this awful struggle for exist- 
ence every animal would in time become a suc- 
culina. Starvation has been a part of the 
world's food. Our first stage in becoming 
angels is necessarily to fight like devils. 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY S43 

Cruelty to the individual has been kindness to 
the race; selfishness in the realm of physics 
has done the same uplifting work as unselfish- 
ness in the realm of morals. And horrible as 
the struggle seems from our Christian stand- 
point, out of it — out of only the bare and 
cindered rock and the organless and senseless 
protoplasm to start with, has come our 
Christian standpoint itself — come the beauti- 
ful, organized, intelligent world which is here 
to-day, the fragrant flower, the singing bird, 
the stately tree, the marvels of the brute crea- 
tion and the race of man. 

But physical perfection and an animal world 
are not the whole of nature's aim. She has 
had other things in view, a moral and spiritual 
being and a social, civilized, religious world. 
How were these to be attained? Self-seeking, 
eating each other up, trampling down the weak 
and poor, agencies so potent in her physical 
realm, were powerless for this higher work. 
Others were needed, those which involve love, 
justice, mercy, self-denial, self-sacrifice. And 
it is at this point and for this purpose that the 
principle of preserving the weak and poor, the 
physically unfit, comes in, the stone rejected by 
the animal builders, which is made the corner- 
stone in the temple of soul. 

It is a principle which operates as a factor 
of this higher evolution in two ways. The first 



2U ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

is by bettering the poor, the sick, the weak 
themselves, making them the fit, lifting them 
up into health, strength, morals, self-support. 
While nature was working chiefly on bodies, 
and could use the unfit ones as food, it did not 
pay to spend effort on what was imperfect ; but 
when she came to soul, it would seem as if 
everything had been brought along so far and 
had cost so much that it began to be precious 
— paid better to be improved and kept on with 
than to be broken up and used bver. Then, 
too, having the one do for the other brought in 
gratitude, allayed antagonism, helped bind the 
two classes together, and so evolved the higher 
social world. It is a kind of work which the 
hard times of this past winter have been the 
occasion of on a grand scale. They have 
brought the fit and the unfit into such kindly 
relations with each other as not all the preach- 
ing in the world could have brought about, 
have compelled, too, a study of their problem 
such as it never before has had — have done 
it, also, just at a crisis when the two classes 
were getting dangerously wide apart, a benefit 
which more than pays for their money loss. 
There is nothing else which can do it so well — 
love, not law, which is needed to put down so- 
cial discontent, the loaf of bread thrown one 
way which stops as no gallows can the dyna- 
mite bomb thrown the other, capital's wives and 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY M5 

daughters basket-armed and love-sent who have 
been going every day this past winter into 
quarters of our large cities unharmed, where 
capital's police, bludgeon-armed and law-sent, 
could have gone only through blood. And 
though in the past such service has aimed 
chiefly at relief, it is being gradually found 
that it cannot stop there, but must go on, 
helping the dependent to become the indepen- 
dent, and the unfit to be in all respects the fit. 
Better still, lifting up the unfit operates as 
nothing else can to lift up the fit themselves 
into being more fit. Bodies grow by self-seek- 
ing and by what they take in ; souls by self- 
sacrifice and by what they give out. When a 
tiger meets a sick and wounded traveler, he is 
made the stronger and larger by eating him up. 
When a man meets a sick and wounded traveler, 
he is made the stronger and larger by saying 
him from being eaten up. All qualities which 
are put forth to help others — love, sympathy, 
kindness, justice — - react and help the helpers ; 
all the downward things which called them 
forth — weakness, want, sickness, sin — be- 
come the world's uplifters. Who has not seen 
families where the little crippled boy's feet 
have been the ones on which the strong, rough 
brothers have reached heights of gentleness and 
self-denial into which not all the physical vigor 
of the world, nor all the teachings of its Sun- 



246 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

day-schools could have carried them alone? 
The live babies of the household may unlock 
for their parents the joys of earth; but it is 
the dead ones who open for them the heavenly 
gates. Look at the dark side of a great city, 
at its white faces, bleared eyes, brutal passions, 
bloody crimes, and you exclaim what a drag on 
the world's progress is their preservation. 
Look at the bright side of a large city, the 
white souls, pitying eyes, angelic graces, heroic 
deeds, which the struggle to save them has 
called forth, and you ask what other agency in 
all this world is aiding progress so much. 
Count the tramps who are walking the earth 
as the result of 1800 years of Christian care 
for their survival, and you question where is 
its wisdom. Count the saints who walk the 
skies as the result of 1800 years giving them 
that care, and you have a hundredfold the 
question's answer. It is the unfit who are the 
food of the fit in the new dispensation as truly 
as in the old, only now it is by their saving in- 
stead of by their being destroyed. The im- 
perfections of nature are the raw material out 
of which are made the perfections of spirit. 
None of the shot with which Providence loads 
his gun really fail. Those which miss the ani- 
mal hit the man — go astray of the mark at 
the distance of a generation, lodge in its very 
bull's eye fifty million years off. Reformers 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY S47 

stand aghast sometimes at the immensity of 
our age's problems, those especially of poverty, 
vice and crime. They are the most precious 
commodity there is on this earth to-day, are 
worth more to it than all its mines and manu- 
factures, are a grander field for its science than 
any sun or star, for they mean the mining and 
making of men, and are a shop where the things 
made, make also the makers. What if the ma- 
terial is so large and so constantly increasing 
as to preclude all hope of its being all made 
morally fit in this life? That only adds new 
need, new meaning for a future life, suggests 
that its hell instead of being the mere refuse 
heap of the universe, as so many have thought, 
may be the quarry out of which new stones are 
to be forever wrought for heaven's walls, its 
sinners more material out of whose saving its 
saints are to be continually more saved. And 
surely it is no unworthy thought, is in keeping 
with what is the divinest element of Christian- 
ity here, is what we have a hint of in the story 
of Jesus going down the first thing after his 
crucifixion to preach to the spirits in prison, 
is better than any endless psalm singing, that 
through all the eternal years souls are to lift 
themselves up by lifting up their weaker 
brother souls. 

There is one vital question more — how this 
tremendous change in nature's use of the unfit 



248 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

has been brought about, what the forces and 
processes by which the principle of their pres- 
ervation has been evolved from the exactly op- 
posite one of their destruction. It was no gift 
of a supernatural world, no message brought 
to earth on angel wings. It began back of all 
religion, back even of man, back among the 
animals themselves, began in that source, as 
worthy always of scientific as of filial rever- 
ence, mother love. The first old hen, — speak- 
ing metonymically, — that scratched the earth 
for a brood of chickens, scratched it up along 
with the worms, kicked over with her clumsy 
legs some of the chickens, but kicked over with 
them the old self-centered universe, gave at 
any rate the blow which is to end with its top- 
pling over. And it came directly out of the 
old system. The chickens being the offspring 
of her own body, care for them was at the start 
simply care for her own larger self, an out- 
growth, therefore, of selfishness. But care is 
in its turn the natural nurse of love — what 
costs us something, that is, what is dear, be- 
coming dear. The feebler, therefore, the off- 
spring were, costing, as they would, more 
care, the dearer they became, the stronger the 
impulse to keep them alive; and this care 
which at first extended only to the brood as a 
whole, gradually differentiated to individuals, 
as everything under evolution does, till in hu- 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 249 

manity everywhere, savage and civilized, the 
weak, puny, physically unfit child, needing 
most the mother's anxiety and care, is the one 
to which naturally she gives the most, — the 
first cosmic step how easily, yet how wonder- 
fully taken across the apparently impassable 
chasm between care for the fit and care for the 
unfit! The Christian housewife, when she cuts 
off part of the old hen's coarse, tough legs in 
preparing it for dinner, does not think of any 
connection between them and the subtle, sacred 
ties which bind her to her sick babe upstairs, or 
the Christian minister, as he eats the other 
part, a guest at her table, of their relation to 
one of the sacredest, grandest elements of his 
religious faith; yet not less certainly they have 
all been evolved in nature's factory out of one 
primal stock. 

Another factor helping on the change is the 
underlying solidarity of all life in one grand 
organic whole, one vast and all-embracing self. 
The reason why animals prey on each/ other is 
not hate but hunger; why the strong prey on 
the weak, not tyranny but facility in satisfy- 
ing the hunger; and why the weak and odd 
ones of the same family, even when not needed 
as food, are pecked at and driven off, is be- 
cause difference from the common size and look 
has been so long associated with what is to be 
feared as predatory that the sight of it raises 



250 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

at once and blindly the instinct of self-de- 
fense. Just as likeness makes liking, for we 
like at first only what is like us, so unlikeness 
makes dislike. With savage and nomadic 
tribes, also, surrounded with foes and often 
pinched with want, care of the old and feeble 
is a source inevitably of tribal weakness ; put- 
ting them to death, therefore, a condition of 
tribe survival, done with filial love and endured 
with patriotic submission. And thus it is that 
care for the original, larger, homogeneous self 
is overcome and held in abeyance by the neces- 
sity of providing for the smaller, differenti- 
ated, individual self. But the original oneness 
is not lost, any more than universal gravity 
was in the evolution of suns and planets ; and 
as the world progresses and tribes become 
larger and more settled, it reasserts itself in a 
higher form. The differentiations of labor 
under the industrial stage of society give the 
weak kinds of work to do, and a tribal value 
that is impossible in war. Patriotism and 
pride come in, covering with their segis every 
citizen, however humble, as a part of the com- 
mon whole. And out of the original life-unity 
there emerges at last the mystic tie of sympa- 
thy reaching out with its nerves finer than 
those of flesh to everything which lives, even 
the feeblest creature, and making all others a 
sharer of its joy and pain, and so interested 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY S51 

for their own sakes to secure its welfare — the 
subtle scientific truth which underlies the great 
command, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself," not as much as but as thyself. 

Allied with this solidarity and growing out 
of it, the union of the weak with each other for 
mutual help and protection has contributed not 
a little to the general principle of their being 
cared for and preserved. Animals which indi- 
vidually were unfit, very soon learned that col- 
lectively they might have the highest degree of 
fitness ; and driven off by themselves, their 
misery not only developed a love of company, 
but with it a strength of company which in se- 
curing food, building shelter, and fighting foes 
was the very thing needed for their survival. 
Misery, however, could not thus receive aid 
from its brother misery without giving aid 
back, could not have company at all without 
its being mutual; so care for the individually 
weak and poor became a necessity for the ex- 
istence of the flock and herd; and when the 
weak and poor differentiated out of themselves 
the strong and well-off, what began as a neces- 
sity was inherited as a principle. The Golden 
Rule is a law of nature. Eons before it was 
taught by Jesus, it was acted upon by animals 
and plants. It is the underlying principle to- 
day of all trade-unions and labor organiza- 
tions, — the association and united protection 



25^ ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

of the weak individual laborer against the en- 
croachments of capital; benevolence organized 
as business ; good wages and good treatment 
insisted upon by all for the weakest and poor- 
est because it is the only way in which they all 
can secure for themselves good wages and good 
treatment. The church preaches it and too 
often that is all ; labor practices it. And thus 
how wonderfully and beautifully the trampling 
down of the weak has pressed out of them the 
wine of care for their survival, and the iron 
hammer of ferocity driven home and clinched 
the golden nail of fraternity. 

The unfitness has had, also, in its conta- 
giousness, a powerful goad driving on the fit 
to its relief. It has been learned after many 
terrible lessons that no man can be sick or 
ignorant or vicious to himself alone; and that 
if we do not want him to make us all sick, 
ignorant and vicious, we must all go to work, 
and make him well, educated and virtuous. 
Why have all our large cities been so anxious 
this past winter to vaccinate the poor at the 
public expense? Because the disease of which 
it is thought to be the preventive, is so " catch- 
ing," That word " catching " grows in very 
humble soil, but it has on its branches a vast 
amount of very precious fruit — one-half at 
least of all our asylums, poor laws, schools and 
churches. What we don't do because we love 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 253 

our neighbor as a part of ourself, we have to 
do because we fear him as a part of ourself. 
I knew of a woman down in Arkansas, the 
daughter of a cowboy, and inheriting her 
father's pluck and pistols, whose lazy, domi- 
neering husband tried to impose on her all the 
work. One day when the baby was sick and 
she needed some water for its washing, matters 
came to a crisis. Setting down the bucket on 
the doorway and drawing her revolver, she said, 
" If you don't start with it for that water be- 
fore I count three, I'll shoot." He laughed in 
her face. " One." He laughed again. Bang ! 
And he rolled over in the dust never more to, 
get up. " Two, three," she counted, as leis- 
urely wiping the weapon with her apron, she 
went back to nurse the baby. That is what 
Nature does with her husbands when they re- 
fuse to bring to her sick babies the water of 
life. It is One as a warning; then Bang; and 
not till after they have rolled over, the two 
and three. We call her severe when she deals 
with the babies herself in her animal realm ; but 
it does not begin to equal her severity to those 
in her moral realm who won't deal with them at 
all. Plagues and black deaths have been some 
of her " bangs." The French Revolution was 
another. We shall have one in our own land, 
if we neglect things too long. And counting 
the husbands sneering at reform who as a con- 



254 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

sequence have bitten the dust, what wonder 
that the rest of us are gradually learning to 
seize its bucket with her first word Go, and no 
matter how unfit the babies are, faithfully fill 
it up to the brim ! 

Another potent factor in the evolution of 
this higher principle has been trade. The 
fearful competitions of the business world 
driving the weak and poor to the wall, so op- 
posite apparently to any survival of them, are 
only one of its aspects. What is it the real 
interest of all great trading houses to bring 
about.? Not the poverty of the world. With 
everybody else poor, who is to buy their goods ? 
No ; it is the real interest of all trade, whether 
of one person or of one people, that all other 
persons and all other peoples should have 
something to trade on; and it is this really 
which trade tends to give them. Whatever 
may be accomplished by rascality, there is hon- 
estly no such principle in this universe as the 
rich growing richer, and the poor poorer at 
the same time. It is like electricity. The rub- 
bing which develops it at one pole has to de- 
velop it at the other also. It was business 
which abolished slavery at the North ; the best 
business operation that even white men ever had 
done for them, its abolition at the South ; busi- 
ness that in every direction has given the weak 
and poor a thousand luxuries that without it 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 255 

would have been only their vain wish. I con- 
gratulated a large manufacturer once on the 
interest he took in bettering the condition of his 
workmen. " Oh," he said, " that isn't goodness, 
it's only goods ; there's no machinery it pays 
so well to improve as the human machinery." 
The first vessels sent by Christianity to heathen 
shores carried rum and missionaries. It was 
a mistake only in the kind of merchandise. 
The more gospel, the more goods. And even 
as a business transaction the best investment 
civilization could make of its money would be 
the lifting up the whole savage world into 
moral and religious fitness. 

Finally, on these lower things as a basis, 
religion itself comes in — love, altruism, con- 
science, the sense of right, all the highest and 
best sentiments of our human nature, to com- 
plete the work. We care at last for the unfit 
because we like to. Weakness appeals to our 
gallantry. We shrink with instinctive horror 
from stamping out any creature simply because 
it is feeble and sick — " would not needlessly 
set foot upon a worm." " The Vision of Sir 
Launfal " becomes our favored poetry. The 
trumpet calls of reform thrill our blood as the 
bugle's blast did our sires. A mighty nation 
finds its inspiration for four years of war in 
the freeing of a slave. And when the world's 
greatest and best man, a Jesus, sacrifices his 



^56 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

life to save its meanest and worst — a thing 
so utterly at variance with nature's old econ- 
omy, eighteen hundred years unite in honoring 
it as humanity's crowning deed. 

It is thus that I find a passage from nature's 
Egypt of destroying the unfit, right through 
its awful wilderness and Red Sea on to reli- 
gion's promised land of their preservation and 
lifting up. The old way of writing a novel, 
as you know, was to get its characters and in- 
cidents all involved in a hopeless snarl, the 
lovers parted, the hero knocked senseless, the 
heroine in the villain's clutches, wickedness and 
wealth everywhere triumphant, modesty and 
merit everywhere trampled down; and then to 
unravel the snarl, have the hero saved, the vil- 
lain shot, the maiden rescued, lots of other kill- 
ing done, and somewhere about the fortieth 
chapter the mystery all cleared up, the lovers 
happily married, poetic justice done to every- 
body, and in the distance several fine children. 
Evolution is a novel more full of intricate 
snarls, dramatic surprises and thrilling inci- 
dents than any ever written by a Scott or a 
Sue, one also with killing enough to satisfy the 
most bloodthirsty schoolboy appetite, but which 
unravels at last all entanglements, overcomes 
all brutal villains, brings heroic virtue up out 
of all defeats, and does everybody and every- 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 257 

thing full poetic justice. It is to be noticed, 
also, that it is all accomplished by strictly 
natural laws, without any bringing in, or need 
of bringing in, any Deus ex machina to untie 
the cords in which the Deity within had become 
wound up. Instead of its being true, as Mr. 
Huxley says, that the cosmic process is the 
enemy of the ethical nature and with no sort 
of relation to moral ends, it is directly and in- 
evitably out of the cosmic process and by the 
simple continuance of it that the ethical nature 
and the moral ends have been evolved. " The 
ruthless self-assertion," " the tramping down 
of all competitors," and the survival of only 
the physically fittest, so conspicuous and so re- 
volting at the beginning of the work, were 
engaged after all in laying, as nothing else 
could, the foundations of the structure on which 
alone its ethical part could be raised; and if 
there is anything which argues the height of 
the pinnacle in the coming ethical sky as a 
part of the original design, it is the depth and 
breadth of its base in the physical earth. It 
is a process, to be sure, which is yet very far 
from being completed. Nature never makes 
her changes all at once, never lets go the old 
till her creatures have got a good grip on the 
new. We are now in the transition stage be-» 
tween the two — indeed have been so ever since 
civilization began — are partly under the old 



258 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

law of the survival of the fittest, and in part 
under the new law of saving the unfittest; and 
it is this fact which explains not a few of the 
difficult problems of our time — our tramps, 
our Juke families, our cut-throat business com- 
petitions, our military conflicts, our evils of 
democracy and our aristocratic churches — 
explains the conflict between the cosmic and 
Christian with which Mr. Huxley and others 
are so deeply impressed — is what makes phi- 
lanthropy and reform, a reaching for the ideal 
and yet never cutting loose wholly from the old 
real, one of the most difficult of all arts. But 
it is a stage of the work which is full of hope. 
The shuttle in nature's mighty loom, the same 
as in that of man, is shot back and forth two 
opposite ways, but it carries only one thread 
and weaves only one piece. Egoism at the 
animal end does the same work as altruism at 
the spiritual end, serves the race by serving 
self ; altruism at the spiritual end the same work 
as egoism in the animal, serves self by serving 
the race. And as out of the two there has come 
already a being who has not only the inner 
desire to lift out of their death-stream his unfit 
brothers, but, what is equally important, the 
bodily strength and the solid shore of flesh to 
stand upon which make it possible, so out of 
them both there shall come at last a world in 
which the unfit, never, perhaps, so long as life 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 259 

is progress, ceasing to come, shall everywhere 
be developed into the fit, a realization of Tenny- 
son's splendid trust — 

** That not a worm is cloven in vain; 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shriveled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain; 

That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 

When God hath made the pile complete/* 



vn 

IMMORTAL YOUTH 

Man has always wanted youth and dreaded 
age. The one is associated with beauty, health, 
activity, joy, and love, the other with weariness, 
wrinkles, decay, and death. The hardest thing 
about life, to most people, is its growing old; 
is to see the bloom fading out of the cheek, 
the sparkle out of the eye, the vigor out of 
the limb, and, worst of all, the poetry out of 
the soul; is the coming of that time when 

" Those cheerful suns are set forever 

Which light to youth's gay dreams impart. 
And dried that deep ideal river 

Which fed the fountain of the heart.'* 

As the October of the year, even when lighted 

with all the splendors of ripened fruit and 

reddened leaf, has a sadness about it that 

is never felt in the stormiest days of spring, 

so the October of life, even when surrounded 

with all the accumulations of maturity's 

success, has a shadow hanging over it such 

as never comes to youth's dreariest March. 

Lord Palmerston, when congratulated at the 

age of eighty on his position as prime 

minister of England, laden with honors and 
260 



IMMORTAL YOUTH 261 

lapped in wealth, answered, " Yes, they are 
indeed things to be grateful for; but I would 
gladly give them all up to go back and be a 
boy again as I once was, — poor and unknown 
outwardly, but in the prime of life, and with 
all the measureless wealth and possibilities yet 
within me of boyhood's heart." To be always 
young, to have the bloom of life's springtime 
remain forever on the cheek and the sparkle of 
its morning in the eyes, to feel that days of 
pleasure can be quarried with no end to their 
golden mine, and years of love be sailed with 
no limit to their ocean swell, — this, to many, 
is the ideal of life. 

*' Fair laughs the mom, and soft the zephyr blows, 
As, proudly riding o'er the azure realm; 

In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, 

Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm." 

And there is nothing in the ambitions and 
dreams of the world's past more pathetic than 
its chemists' long search for that Elixir of 
Life which was to bring back to its old men 
their boyhood's freshness and vigor, and its 
voyagers, long wanderings for that Fountain 
of Youth whose waters were to wash away all 
the aches and stains of age, and restore it again 
to its vanished prime, — nothing, perhaps, has. 
contributed more to the success of Christianity 
than its hope that what had been failed of so 



262 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

long ago beyond the seas of earth would at 
last be found beyond the river of death. 

Yet, with all the attractions of youth, there 
is no one who wishes to go back to all that it 
was ; and, with all the drawbacks of age, no one 
who wishes to give up everything it has brought 
him to. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in one of his 
charming poems, so full of human nature, repre- 
sents a listening angel as coming to an old 
man who had been sighing after his lost youth, 
with the offer to restore him to it again, but 
asking him to consider first whether there were 
not some things in his present possessions that 
he would like to take back with him into the 
past. To whom the old man replies : 

" ' Ah ! truest soul of womankind. 
Without thee what were life? 
One bliss I cannot leave behind: 
I'll take my precious wife.* 

*' The angel seized a sapphire pen, 
And wrote in rainbow hue, 
* The man would be a boy again, 
And be a husband, too.* 

** * Ah, yes ! and memory would recall 
My fond paternal joys. 
I could not bear to leave them all, — 
I'll take my girl — and — ^boys.' 



IMMORTAL YOUTH 263 

" The smiling angel dropped his pen: 
* Ah, this will never do ! 
The man would be a boy again, 
And be a father, too ! ' " 

And this is what, I suppose, we all of us do 
really wish for, — the blessings of youth along 
with those of maturity and age, the beauty, 
health, vigor of body, and freshness of feeling 
which belong to life's prime, accompanied with 
the balance of character, the breadth of experi- 
ence, and the treasures of love and knowledge 
that have been gathered up in its later years, — 
want life to be an orange-tree, bearing on its 
branches at once the fragrant flower and the 
luscious fruit; this, I suppose, that is the 
common idea of mortality, — a state in which 
we shall have all the bloom and vigor of youth 
without its ignorance and inexperience, and all 
the wisdom and worth of age without its 
wrinkles and weariness ; a state in which 
through all the eternal years we are to ripen 
to celestial fruit, yet never lose the celestial 
flower; see children and children's children 
coming to join us from the ranks of humanity 
as long as earth shall endure, yet remain our- 
selves, equally with them, in all the purple 
bloom of unfading youth. 

But, fascinating to the fancy as it may seem 
at first, is such an immortal youth either possi- 



264 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

ble or, in the larger view, really desirable, — 
such a combination of youth and age, progress 
and permanence, otherwise than incongruous 
in itself and incompatible with the very laws 
and nature of all growth? We know how it is 
in this present w^orld. Growth is not outward 
accretion, but inward development ; not con- 
tinuous enlargement, but progressive hetero- 
geneity; not youth with the addition of ma- 
turity and age, but youth unfolded out of itself 
into new capacities and attainments. The 
apple is not a combination of the flower and 
the fruit, not something which can be itself and 
at the same time the bud and blossom, but an 
evolution of the flower into the fruit, — some- 
thing which is possible only by the dropping 
of its fair petals and the giving up of its 
floral life. So with the blossoming and ripen- 
ing of the human soul. The man is not merely 
an enlarged boy, not merely the qualities of 
youth increased with those of maturity and 
age, but the form and faculties of the boy un- 
folded out of themselves into those of the 
man. And while each period of life, taken 
by itself, has its own special charm, the eff*ort 
to combine the two artificially — as when the 
ancient belle puts on the dark tresses and pink 
cheeks of a young girl, and the antiquated beau 
the dudish dress and frisky airs of a young man 
— only destroys the beauty of the one, and adds 



IMMORTAL YOUTH 265 

to the other an ugliness it never has by itself 
alone. What reason is there to think that it 
will be otherwise in the eternal world, — that 
growth there will not be of the same nature 
and follow the same laws as growth here? And, 
if it were possible for the qualities of the two 
extremes of life to be blended in the future 
state, — if the soul were to rise out of the grave 
at eighty with the spiritual rouge on it of 
twenty, and the saint with his burden of eighty 
thousand years go skipping about the streets 
of the New Jerusalem as friskily as he did, a 
sinner, at the age of eighteen about the streets 
of New York, — would not the contrast be even 
more ludicrous in the sight of the angels than 
it is with us now in the case of their earthly 
rejuvenation? 

Must we, then, give up utterly this hope 
of immortal youth, look forward to a rising out 
of death with all the imperfections as well as 
with all the excellencies that the soul had on 
going into it, think of immortality as a con- 
tinuous forever of that growing old which gets 
to be such a burden in these few brief years of 
time, — an increase endlessly, it may be, in wis- 
dom and knowledge and virtue, but an increase 
endlessly also in conservatism and inactivity, in 
spiritual stiffness and fancy-baldness, in heart- 
wrinkles and soul-rheumatics ! If such is in- 
deed to be the case, then we may well antici- 



^66 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

pate our immortal destiny with the tremblings 
of despair rather than with the throbbings of 
hope. When Gulliver, that famous traveler, 
who had visited Lilliput with its inhabitants 
only six inches high, and Brobdingnag with its 
people sixty feet tall, arrived at the kingdom 
of Luggnagg, he was told among its other 
wonders of a certain class of Luggnaggians 
called Struldbrugs, who had the peculiarity of 
never dying, but whose old age developed, along 
with its shrewdness and knowledge, such un- 
pleasant qualities of avarice, opinionatedness, 
and selfishness, expressed, too, in their faces, 
that, to keep them from frightening and en- 
tirely overwhelming the other Luggnaggians, 
they had to be shut up in pens. Gulliver, hav- 
ing expressed a desire to see a few of these 
earthly immortals, was conducted to a place 
where several very ancient ones were closelj^ con- 
fined. He looked at them as long as he could 
stand their ugliness, then, having rested his 
eyes, looked again, and at last tried to borrow 
two or three specimens of them to take home to 
England, as the best possible means by which 
to cure the English people of the fear of dy- 
ing. The story is one of Dean Swift's ex- 
quisite bits of satire against certain aristo- 
cratic families of England who had their an- 
tiquity to glory in, and nothing else ; but, if 
the inhabitants of the spirit world are indeed 



IMMORTAL YOUTH 267 

to go on through all eternity, growing old in 
the same way and with the same traits that 
some people do here on earth for their fifty, 
sixty, seventy years of time, the story will ap- 
ply equally well to their case ; and the result 
would be at last a set of spiritual Struldbrugs 
one specimen of which would be enough to make 
us mortals content to remain forever in the 
finer beauty of the grave and in the sweeter 
brotherhood of the worm and the clod. 

These things, however, thank Heaven ! are not 
the only possibilities which are before us in the 
way of immortality. There is a form of it 
conceivable which does combine, to a certain ex- 
tent, the two things craved for, — what is best 
in youth with what is best in age, — and which 
is in exact accordance with the laws and nature 
of all earthly growth. It consists not in the 
preservation forever of our present youthful 
faculties, feelings, tastes themselves, but only 
of a subtle essence out of them, stored up in 
the soul itself, and in the unfolding repeatedly, 
as the first ones grow older, of other new ones 
having their times of vigor and freshness, and 
so on as long as soul shall last, — the youth be- 
ing thus the changeable factor by which the 
growing is done, and retaining, or rather pass- 
ing on, forever its freshness ; and the age the 
permanent factor, embodying all the finer re- 
sults of the growth and leaving behind all its 



268 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

deadness ; and the means and conditions, the 
larger spring, by which the unfolding is in- 
duced and stimulated, are new scenes, new 
truths, new friends, new kinds of work, every- 
thing acting on the soul which is in advance of 
what it has had acting on it before. 

It is a kind of immortal youth that we have 
an illustration of here and now in the phenom- 
ena of the natural world. Every year nature 
is growing older and older in its life, every 
year richer and richer in its own inherent na- 
ture ; yet every year it is showing more bloom, 
more vigor, more of those qualities which are 
preeminently the characteristics of youth, than 
ever it did before. It will be almost an eternity, 
this present spring, since the rising of its first 
seed out of the ground. But, instead of ex- 
hibiting any signs of decrepitude and old age, 
it will burst forth in a few days, as we know, 
even in spite of these east winds, with a rich- 
ness and variety of verdure beyond anything 
that was even hinted at in its far-off beginning. 
And this law is so vivid and constant that our 
very ideas of old and young, so far as nature 
is concerned, have become completely reversed. 
We think of its early geological days, the time 
actually of its youth, as its antiquity, and of 
the animals and plants it produced then — fos- 
sils now — as its ancient ones, and of its last 



IMMORTAL YOUTH 269 

and really its oldest season, its millionth per- 
haps, as its youngest time, and of the animals 
and plants that are being produced now in 
what, counting by years, is actually its old age, 
as the offspring of its youth. And it sings 
truly through its Emerson : — 

" No ray is dimmed, no atom worn; 
My oldest force is good as new; 
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn 
Gives back the bending heavens in dew." 

How is this immortal youth of nature 
brought about? Notedly, not by preserving 
the forms of life it produced at first undecayed, 
but by letting them continually die out, leaving 
only the subtle results of their growth behind 
them, and having new and improved ones take 
their places, — " life living upon death," — ris- 
ing gradually from the beauty of color in the 
shell of a mollusk to the beauty of poetry and 
of religion in the soul of a man. And, so far 
as we can see, there is no end to the process. 
The older nature grows, the younger nature 
is ; and ten thousand, perhaps ten million, years 
from now its springs will have a bloom on their 
cheek, its animals and plants a vigor in their 
limbs, its young men and maidens a romance in 
their hearts, beyond anything that can be con- 
ceived of to-day. 



270 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

" Still on the seeds of all that's made 
The rose of beauty burns; 
Through times that wear and forms that fade 
Immortal youth returns/' 

Human nature is another illustration of the 
same great law. The babe that is born of it 
to-day is really the offspring of its myriadfold 
octogenarian age ; inherits in its blood some- 
thing out of all the multiplied growth of the 
past; is in its deeper life as old as the race it- 
self. Yet who, looking into the cradle at its 
fair face, can detect there any marks of this 
immeasurable antiquity.? Who can say it is 
not as fresh, as innocent, as lovely, as richly 
endowed with all the finest qualities of youth, 
as any Cain or Abel ever was of its far-off 
prime, — infinitely more so than any babe of 
its beginning, simply preserved till now undy- 
ing and ungrowing, could possibly he? And, 
plainly, human nature keeps itself thus forever 
fresh and young by putting forth forever these 
fresh young lives. 

Hum.an society, — is not that also immortally 
fresh and young in the same way.'' Timid souls 
do indeed talk as if it had about come to its 
last days ; see in its shattered creeds only a 
dying out of its religious life, and in the thou- 
sand anarchistic, socialistic, and labor throes 
with which it is convulsed, the evidence only of 
its general breaking-up. Fools, so to misread 



IMMORTAL YOUTH 271 

the verj signs of its continued youth! Dying 
trees do not bourgeon forth with new buds and 
blossoms, or dying men with new undertakings 
and plans. Society never before was so fresh 
and young as it is to-day, never before had such 
vast activities, such wide and warm affections, 
such unbounded hopes and dreams and ideals 
of a better coming state — all youth marks — 
as it has now at its topmost age. If some of 
its old foundations have crumbled, it is only 
to have their materials used in raising iiew and 
better superstructures. 

** Ever the rock of ages melts 
Into the mineral air 
To be the quarry whence to build 
Thought and its mansions fair." 

Why, its races have but just come to the love- 
making period of their lives. It was only week 
before last that the battleships of nine of its 
greatest nations — things which hitherto have 
belched at each other's sides only destruc- 
tion and death — vied with each other in see- 
ing whose tongues of fire could speak loudest 
the salutes of peace, and in proclaiming out 
of their iron throats, with a powdered empha- 
sis that hate never had of old, their messages 
of united good will. And this very last week 
this grand old earth of ours has blossomed 
forth with a World's Fair petalled and sta- 



272 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

mened with all the arts and industries and 
sciences and charities and reforms, ay, and 
religions, of its myriad people, — a mayflower 
indeed of its latest spring blooming in the 
prairies of the West, which transcends how 
infinitely far anything that was ever dreamed 
of under its rising sun, even in its Eden of the 
East! And here, too, the continuity of youth 
has been brought about and kept up in pre- 
cisely the same way as in the other cases, by its 
putting forth continually new shoots from its 
old stalks, and moving into new scenes with its 
old races. See how Christianity, eighteen hun- 
dred years ago, sent the blood of its fresh life 
pulsing through the veins of what seemed then 
a worn-out and effete world, filling alike hovel 
and throne with its shining hopes, and impelling 
gray old Time himself to begin counting his 
years from a new date. All Europe blossomed 
forth a new world intellectually, morally, re- 
ligiously, and in its impulse to liberty, under 
the discovery four hundred years ago of this 
new world, of land across the seas, — Ponce de 
Leon being a wiser man than he has ever had 
the credit of being in coming to these shores 
in search of his Fountain of Youth. An Elixir 
of Life richer than alchemy of old ever hoped 
for has been given to our own day in Darwin's 
thought and in Spencer's long toil. And the 
thousand reformatory, religious, and socialistic 



IMMORTAL YOUTH 273 

movements with which our age is fairly 
crammed, as they are the signs of its existing 
youth, so they are the means by which that 
youth is to be continued and developed in the 
future, making it indeed true that 

" Through the shadows of the globe we sweep into 
the younger day." 

It is a kind of immortal youth, moreover, 
which is not only illustrated in these great 
worlds of nature and humanity as a possibility 
for the individual soul, but one that we can 
see the actual beginnings of now and here in 
its growth. Man's faculties do not unfold all 
together, but, as we know, m a natural order 
and succession, — first the bodily appetites and 
senses, then the affections, the imagination, the 
memory, then the moral nature and the business 
faculties, then reason and judgment, and at last 
the spirit's insight and love. And each of 
these, as it comes along, and as it mounts up 
into new fields and into new phases, has its own 
special period of youth, shared in to some ex- 
tent by the whole soul. I know how it is in my 
own case ; and I doubt not all of you here have 
had something of the same experience. I never 
feel the awakening within me of new powers 
and interests, never rise into a new set of emo- 
tions and ideas, never enter on a new field of 
work, — and, the more advanced and unpopular 



274 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

for the time it is, the more it brings of this 
splendid reward, — without finding in them 
something of the same thrill, romance, spring- 
time glow, that I felt in childhood at the open- 
ing of the bodily senses, and in youth at the 
blossoming of mind and heart. Who has not 
known women that have found in toil for some 
noble cause a toilet more efficient than any that 
art ever furnished for keeping even the body 
radiant with the spirit's youth, — women whose 
beauty, more truly than with any voluptuous 
Cleopatra, " age cannot wither, nor custom 
stale " ? It is the true explanation of the en- 
thusiastic delight the young convert feels at 
the awakening of his religious life. As Jesus 
tells us, literally he is " born again," — has new 
faculties unfolded within him, a new world 
opened to his view. . And it is all normal, there- 
fore, that he should have something of the 
same fresh delight that he had in the first years 
of his bodily j^outh. It is what every great 
discoverer experiences when he lays hold of a 
new truth ; is what sent Archimedes of old rush- 
ing naked out of the bath, where he had solved 
his problem of specific gravity and King 
Hiero's crown, shouting with all a boy's enthu- 
siasm, " Eureka ! Eureka ! " " I have found it ! " 
Conservatism, timidity, narrowness of aim, 
loitering at the rear in the march of thought, 
— these are what hasten on age : progressive- 



IMMORTAL YOUTH 275 

ness, courage, breadth of view, keeping abreast 
of the times, — these what stave it off. " Al- 
ways young for liberty," Channing's noble 
motto, is what all of us can be. The old 
miracle of Joshua, stumbling-block so long to 
the literalists of Scripture, is repeated again 
and again in our modern age. The sun of 
life's sky does stand still over Gibeon, and the 
moon of its youth over Ajalon, to all men who 
are fighting the battles of the Lord. And it is 
when the blood has been heated in the tropics 
of reform that is shown even here on earth 

" How far the Gulf Stream of our youth may flow 
Into the Arctic region of our lives.'* 

Why, now, — to complete the thought, — 
should not this same law hold good and this 
same process go on in the spirit world and in 
the immortal life? Yea, why should not a new 
environment do there what a new environment 
always tends to do here, — intensify the proc- 
ess, break up all the deadness of age, awaken 
within us a crowd of new feelings and faculties, 
and in the new work which it gives them ever- 
more to do give the doers a sense of sharing 
evermore in their freshness and youth .f^ Of 
course, this does not imply that we are not to 
retain all of our earthly faculties and feelings 
which can be of any use there, the same as we 
do here the older ones in the midst of the new. 



^76 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

And, emphatically, it does not imply that with 
the unfolding of the new affections the old ob- 
jects of affection are necessarily to be given 
up. The old tools, the old creeds, the old in- 
stitutions, — these, indeed, we are to leave be- 
hind us, the same as we do the toys and the 
games of our childhood, for they, in their very 
nature, are fixed, and cannot grow. But the 
old friends that we have loved, — the supposi- 
tion is that they, too, as living beings, are 
equally with us to grow young, unfold new 
traits of character, new breadths of being, new 
graces on which for the new affections to fasten 
themselves. 

" Burned on her cheek with ever-deepening fire 
The spirit's youth that never passes by." 

And thus love to those above,^ whom we have 
learned to love below, — father, mother, hus- 
band, wife, child, friend, — may have through 
all the eternal years something of the freshness, 
romance, thrill, something of the eternal youth, 
that love, to start with, always does have here 
in time. 

Who will say that such a conception of im- 
mortal youth does not make it infinitely richer 
and more desirable, as well as vastly more rea- 
sonable, than any mere return to the qualities, 
however purified, of our earthly prime.? Who, 
with it in view, will mourn so very much that he 



IMMORTAL YOUTH 277 

is drifting away from the rose and gold of 
life's earlier morning, that the dreams and 
hopes of its opening years are fading, and that 
its pink on the cheek and its wild thrill of the 
senses can never come to him again? Who, 
rather, will not press forward with new ardor 
in that onward path, opening to-day as never 
before, that will fill his noonday sky with a 
richer rose and gold, make him a sharer in hu- 
manity's larger hopes and dreams, and give him 
the freshness of a great enthusiasm and the 
thrill of a forever-growing soul? To keep our 
minds open to the grand new truths of our 
time, to join the ranks, when thin and few, 
of some new and therefore hated reform, to 
stand at the forefront in the fierce battles that 
a larger liberty is fighting now for our race, to 
take some part, however humble it may be, in 
dealing with those awful problems that are 
seething in the social cauldron of to-day, — 
here is the Elixir of Life in nature's own 
laboratory that crucible and chemist never 
found; here the Fountain of Youth, flowing at 
our very doors, that voyager of old sought in 
vain beyond the seas. And, having thus 
learned the secret of keeping young in these 
years of time, what can eternity be, with its 
larger sphere, but a new opening in which to 
use it for making the immortal years mean 
more and more an immortal youth, and for 



278 ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 

showing, even so far as the freshness of life 
is concerned, 

" That men may rise on stepping-stones 
Of their dead selves to higher things " ? 



SERMONS 



I 

CHILDHOOD 

A CHRISTMAS SERMON 

The child Jesus. — Luke ii. 27. 

Christmas is coming. Even if there were no 
calendar to tell us of the time, even if we were 
away on another planet watching the earth, the 
outward aspect of things, the preparations for 
it which have been going on for weeks in all 
Christian lands, would warn us of its approach, 
would indicate, at any rate, that some wide- 
spread, periodic change, like the double jines 
on the planet Mars, was taking place on our 
puzzling star. Right amid the chills of winter 
our churches and parlors suddenly adorn them- 
selves with vernal hues. Right amid the short- 
est, darkest days of the year a mighty wave of 
joy rises up and sweeps over vast sections of 
the earth. Great crowds of people surge 
through city streets, bearing all manner of 
strange bundles. Parents are seen in corners 
planning mysterious things for their children; 
children in groups, plotting wonderful surprises 
for their parents. The current of human na- 
281 



282 SERMONS 

ture seems reversed. Persons, who all the rest 
of the year are eagerly getting from others all 
they can, are now seized with a mania for giv- 
ing to others all that is possible ; and, morally, 
this old earth of ours, on the 25th of Decem- 
ber, must present a picture which transcends in 
beauty all that it reaches physically, even on 
the 21st of June. 

What is the occasion of this marvelous 
change, what the central figure in this charm- 
ing commotion? 

It is the birth of a little Jewish boy in a 
manger nineteen hundred years ago, is the 
idealized face of a little, speechless child. 

The cause is one which seems at first glance 
utterly inadequate for such an excitement, the 
figure one which, in contrast with the honors 
paid it, is almost ludicrous in its smallness. 
Why, it may be asked, should so much stress 
be laid, even by Christians, on the birth of 
Jesus, involving, as it does, the memory of him 
as a mere babe? If he was indeed a supernat- 
ural being, — angel or God, as so many excel- 
lent people profess to believe, — would it not 
have been vastly more in harmony with his ce- 
lestial nature and more likely to have impressed 
the world and to have won him followers, if he 
could have been celebrated as descending out 
of heaven in the fullness and strength of his ma- 
turity rather than in the weakness and insig- 



CHILDHOOD 283 

nificance of a puling infancy ? And those of us 
who find it impossible to accept literally the 
wonderful legends of his nativity, those of us 
who believe he was born into the world pre- 
cisely as every other child is, why, especially, 
should we fasten our attention so largely on his 
cradle? Why not take him at some one grand 
moment of his manhood — that in which he 
spoke the law of love or bade defiance to scribe 
and Pharisee, or placed himself at the side of 
the despised woman of Samaria — as the figure 
to honor with our memories and make the center 
of our joys? 

These are questions which suggest naturally 
for our Christmas thoughts the significance to 
himself and to the world of the infancy of 
Jesus, and, as represented in him, the signifi- 
cance in the divine economy of all birth and 
babyhood. 

I. His entering life as a little babe is the 
strongest possible testimony to his natural and 
simple humanity. Good old Dr. Watts could 
indeed sing of him. — 

" This infant is the mighty God^ 
Come to be suckled and adored." 

And there have been countless other men who 
have professed to believe that he was really 
such. But they have been able to do so only 
by looking at him in a creed rather than in a 



284 SERMONS 

cradle. No one can picture to himself the ac- 
tual infancy of Jesus, — his rounded face and 
limbs, his being nursed at Mary's bosom and 
carried in Mary's arms, his dawning smile of 
intelligence and love, his tottering steps as he 
learned to walk, and his thousand little blunders 
as he was taught to speak and read and know 
right from wrong; and then, with any claim 
either to reverence or sanity, believe that he 
was, at the same time, the Infinite and Eternal 
Head of the universe, worshiped in the courts 
of heaven and pervading all worlds with his 
majesty and might. Even Raphael, with all 
his genius, could not paint him as otherwise 
than a perfectly human child, having in his eyes 
the same light, only a little more of it, which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the world. 
And all Christendom each Christmas morn, 
whatever its professions at other times may be, 
is at heart entirely humanitarian in its faith. 

Regarded, however, as simply a natural 
event and as a type of what it is in the case of 
all other children, the birth of Jesus is a marvel 
worthy of all the commemoration it has ever 
received. The mystery everywhere of hu- 
manity's opening life, the utterance of a soul 
into its sphere, the flowering even in its hum- 
blest form of that great tree of being whose 
roots go down through all soils and all ages, — 
there is no mystery of a miracle, no birth of a 



CHILDHOOD 285 

planet, no inauguration of an empire, which 
can compare with it either as a marvel or in its 
immeasurable significance. All the forces of 
all the past have been at work for its evolution : 
all the animals of all the rocks have been its 
prophetic announcers. Its ancestors, not with 
Jesus alone, but in the case of every child, reach 
back to the first Adams and Eves who stood on 
earth, — yea, and include among them, as truly 
as its parents of flesh and blood, the Holy 
Ghost, the overshadowing of that Power, more 
than matter, without which no life can ever be. 
Its tiny form is the bridge between the mighty 
past and the mighty future over which, by the 
laws of heredity, there go in a condensed shape 
all the attainments of our human nature 
through its eons which have gone, and all the 
possibilities of our human nature through its 
eons which are to come. Wise men journey not 
from the East alone, but from all lands, to lay 
their gifts at his feet, — gifts of science, 
poetry, philosophy, religion, " the gold and 
frankincense and myrrh " of the soul. And, 
if there is any truth in the doctrine of a per- 
sonal immortality, the life which is then begun 
is destined to endure when all the glory of em- 
pires shall have faded into oblivion, and all the 
splendors of science, even that crowning 
science which solves the problem of the universe, 
shall be only a far-off memory. And such an 



386 SERMONS 

event, exemplified for all humanity in the birth 
of the Nazareth babe, — may it not well have 
all that is sweetest in song and tenderest in love 
and most reverent in religion gathered up to do 
it homage? 

II. Again, the infancy and childhood of 
Jesus, little as they could accomplish directly 
for his work, were not a lost period out of his 
life, not an experience which, in accounting for 
his after career, can be left out of sight, but 
are one of its most important parts, one with- 
out which some of its maturer features would 
be wholly inexplicable. He never could have 
loved and won to his arms children as he did, 
never could have spoken those gracious words 
about them which are such a precious part of 
his gospel, had he not once been himself a child ; 
never could have sympathized with the weak, 
childish, and tempted of all ages, as he did, 
had he never, in his own person, grown up 
through weakness, immaturity, and temptation 
into favor with God and man ; never could have 
built the kingdom of heaven on earth with the 
wisdom he did had he not, first of all, learned 
how, from boyhood up, to build himself. It 
was the child in him, as in all of us, that was 
father of the man, — the year next his cradle, 
as well as the year next his cross, which had its 
part to do in making him the Saviour of the 
world ; his training as an infant in a home which 



CHILDHOOD 287 

did for him what never perhaps could have 
been done by the training of him as an adult in 
a heaven. 

So in every human life. There is no possi- 
bility of laying too much stress on what is done 
for it by its opening years. Infant baptism is 
sometimes ridiculed as a senseless rite; and, 
considered as the means of a literal salvation, or 
in any way as having of itself " made this child 
regenerate," it doubtless is deserving of its in- 
creasing disuse. But, looked at symbolically, 
it is the expression of a great educational 
truth. Single drops of the water of life at its 
starting-point are more potent in its shaping 
than whole rivers of it in after years. It is 
what is put as seed into the baby that comes out 
richest as fruit in the man, the influence which 
surrounds the first year of its cradle that will 
be felt by it down to the remotest year of its 
eternity. And, with us all, to grow up as a 
child in a home is a diviner blessing than, were 
it possible, to be dropped down out of heaven 
as an angel or a man. 

III. Once more, the infancy of Jesus as 
told in Bible story has been, as a matter of 
history, no small part of the agency which has 
secured for his religion and for himself their 
grand positions in the world and in the heart. 
All mothers, the world over, turn instinctively 
to a baby with their love: all persons, even the 



288 SERMONS 

rudest, yield something to its sway. A gospel 
which came to humanity in dimpled cheeks and 
laughing eyes and chubby hands had a winsome- 
ness from the start beyond anything which elo- 
quence or logic or miracle could offer, — a re- 
ligion whose beginning was a home, a cradle, 
and a child, a vantage-ground such as one with 
only a church, a sermon, and a priest never 
could have known. And the infant in Mary's 
arms, pictured first in Scripture words, then in- 
canvassed and idealized by Raphael and the 
great painters of all the Christian ages, and 
found to-day under the multiplications of mod- 
em art in almost every home, has spoken a 
language and touched a chord which all classes 
of persons — prince and peasant, savage and 
civilized, wise and witless — could alike under- 
stand and feel. Out in Western Texas, where 
I was a while before our Civil War, there stood 
an old Spanish mission church, named San 
Jose, nearly ruined by having been made the 
scene of repeated battles, but still having over 
its altar a very fine picture of the Crucifixion. 
One day a party of roughs from San Antonio, 
fearing neither God nor man, broke into the 
building, and, with their pistols, began making 
a target of its picture. The old priest in 
charge of the place implored them, with tears 
in his eyes and with every persuasion piety and 
horror could prompt, to desist from the sacri- 



CHILDHOOD ^89 

lege. In vain. They only threatened to fire 
also at his own white head. At last, with happy 
inspiration, he seized a picture of the Sistine 
Madonna near by, having in it the wonderful 
child face of the infant Jesus, and, holding it 
up before that of the Crucifixion, bade them, 
if they must shoot, to fire at that. The brutal 
leader, with a ringing oath, at once leveled his 
revolver at the child face. But those calm, 
sweet, unfathomable eyes, the marvel of all art, 
looked straight and trusting into his ; and he 
did what, fronting man, he never yet had done, 
— dropped its muzzle with a bit of tremor. 
His companions jeered at him for his cowardice, 
and again he raised the weapon, but with the 
same result. A third time he tried and failed. 
Then, with a strange look in his own eyes, but 
a voice there was no jeering at now, he faced 
his fellow-ruffians, shouting: " Away with you 
all ! The man who shoots at that child, I'll put 
a bullet through him ! " 

So in the great cathedral of history, amid 
the insults and derisions leveled so often 
against Christianity's altar. It is not the 
Christ on the cross, but the Christ in the Jew- 
ish mother's arms, which again and again has 
saved it from desecration. And in the Church 
itself, sometimes as rude and ruffian with its 
priests and theologians as any outsiders have 
been, it is not its saints and sages, not its ma- 



^90 SERMONS 

jestic walls and stately columns, which have en- 
deared it to the popular heart and made it a 
home, but the fact, as with so many other 
homes, that in it was a baby. 

It is a service for religon which is shared in 
by all children. Not in poetry alone, but in 
sober fact, is it true that 

** Heaven lies about us in our infancy^'* 
** And not in utter nakedness. 
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come." 

Faith, hope, and love are their natural endow- 
ments ; and the innocence, the truth, the heaven, 
which look out of their eyes are what no brutali- 
ties of doubt can easily muster the courage to 
destroy. 

IV. Nor is this all. The infant Jesus has 
not only helped save religion to the world,. but 
has also been a most potent factor in saving 
religion to itself and in aiding it to be for the 
world a real saving power. You remember the 
story of the rough miner at the theater in the 
early days of California before homes and 
families had gone there, how, in the midst of 
the performance on the stage, when an infant 
among the audience burst into wailing and the 
poor mother tried in vain to hush it up, he 
shouted, " Stop the play, and let us hear the 
baby cry " ; and how the whole assembly of 
rough, strong men sat there, listening to its 



CHILDHOOD mi 

little voice, thinking of their own homes and 
loved ones far away, and finding in the memo- 
ries it brought up a joy never felt in drama and 
a wealth never found in mines, till their silence 
hushed it to sleep on the loving mother's 
breast. So in the Church, amid the great 
tragedies of theology which for eighteen hun- 
dred years have been enacted on its stage, the 
wrangling of priests, the blood of martyrs, and 
the clash of sects, the rough ages with every 
Christmas eve have stopped the theologians' 
play and, with softened hearts and bettered 
souls, have heard the Christian baby cry. 

Here, also, Jesus is only a type of how it 
has been with children everywhere. Among 
the many striking truths brought out by evolu- 
tion one is that the plank by which ethics 
crossed over from egoism to altruism — that is, 
from the love of self to the love of others — 
was laid for it by these little ones, they as the 
offspring of the parental self being the 
" others " in caring for whom selfishness itself 
had to become altruistic ; and another truth is 
the one first pointed out by Mr. Fiske, the 
longer period of infancy in the human species 
which compelled its parents to remain united 
and in one place, and so originated the family 
and the home and made civilization a possibility. 

It is a principle — this use of infancy as the 
agent of progress — which is acted on all 



S92 SERMONS 

through the organic world. What the shep- 
herds of Switzerland do with their flocks when, 
as the season advances, they would get them 
up into higher and better pastures, accessible 
only by narrow, precipice-edged paths along 
which it is impossible to drive the grown sheep, 
take the lambs up in their arms and go with 
them ahead, the whole herd then following 
freely their bleating, is what Nature in all ages 
has done with her flocks in getting them up the 
steeps of time into better mental and moral 
pastures, taken the young there first, given 
them ever finer instincts and nobler desires, 
knowing that, where they call, the race at last 
will climb. Looking back through the centuries, 
the evolution zoologically of each new class, 
order, and species has been not from the per- 
fected old ones, but from the offspring of their 
feeblest contemporaries. The vertebrates did 
not come from the most highly developed of 
the preceding articulates, but from the amphi- 
oxus, a creature inferior to all the others of 
its class in everything but a bit of spinal cord. 
The mammals descended not from megalosaur 
and labyrinthodont, hugest of reptiles, but 
from microlestes and dromotherium, animals 
hardly larger than their scientific names. The 
ancestor of man was not mastodon and ma- 
chairodos, the mighty among mammals, but an 
anthropoid so helpless otherwise that in the 



CHILDHOOD 293 

struggle for existence its only way of survival 
was to climb a tree. And in social evolution^it 
has not been a stock from the great nations of 
antiquity, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, 
which in after years has done the most fbr civil- 
ization, but that from the ones which of old 
were only tribal infants ; not the adult de- 
scendants of the world's great generals, 
scholars, and statesmen, who have pioneered it 
in its upward way, but how often the children 
of men who intellectually were only the little 
ones of their own time, — all a fulfilling of the 
Scripture words, " Thou hast hid these things 
from the wise and prudent and revealed them 
unto babes." 

V. Finally, the respect paid the child Jesus 
has reacted powerfully on Christianity itself in 
making it an agency for securing to all other 
children new happiness, attention, and esteem. 
Its development for awhile, to be sure, was in 
exactly the opposite direction. There is noth- 
ing in all paganism more horrible than that 
doctrine of infant damnation which was taught 
for so many centuries as an article of Chris- 
tian faith. And, indeed, the whole mediaeval 
doctrine of original sin and total depravity in- 
volved their degradation, made them, as one of 
the old divines expressed it, only " serpents' 
eggs." 

But it was a theology as hostile to real 



294 SERMONS 

Christianity as it was to tlie natural human 
heart, and is what the prominence given age af- 
ter age to the childhood of ^Tesus was bound 
sooner or later to kill out. It was impossible to 
honor infancy in him, and not at last to honor 
it everywhere; impossible for art to paint year 
after year the Nazareth babe for cathedral and 
church, using often living babes as models, and 
not see sooner or later that one divine image 
was in them all ; impossible to read again and 
again the Master's own words, " Of such is the 
kingdom of heaven," and continue always think- 
ing that the constituents of that kingdom were 
only " serpents' eggs." 

It is an influence in their behalf which has 
fruited how richly in our day ! There is not a 
theologian in Christendom now, however ruth- 
lessly he may send all other unconverted souls 
to perdition, who dares do otherwise than make 
an exception of all the children. And the place 
they occupy to-day in literature and education, 
the laws which are enacted for their protection, 
the industries which are set at work for their 
entertainment, the presents which are lavished 
upon them at this season of the year, and the 
new gladness which is infused into their lives, 
— is it too much to say that all these have some 
of their rootlets running back to those kindly 
Scripture words which were written of old about 
the childhood of Jesus? 



CHILDHOOD 295 

Surely, then, it is not without solid reasons 
that we have one day in the Christian calendar, 
synchronous properly with Nature's new-born 
year on which to honor the birth and babyhood 
of him who was the beginning of humanity's 
diviner year, and to honor through him all 
babyhood and all birth. Whether viewed scien- 
tifically or spiritually, there is nothing else in 
all the realms of knowledge — no book, no 
scroll, no fossil rock below or shining star above 
— which is more packed with subtle meanings, 
more written over, body, mind, and soul, with 
Nature's own hieroglyphics, more worthy of so- 
ciety's careful keeping, than every new-born 
child. It is out of their unfolding lives that 
comes history, along with their little heads in 
the cradle that sleeps the State, the solution of 
the problem of their purpose that will solve 
the problem of the universe : — 

" Here at the portal thou dost stand, 
And with thy little hand 
Thou openest the mysterious gate 
Into the future's undreamed land." 

It is the legend of Saint Christopher, the 
mighty Syrian giant, whose duty it was to 
carry travelers across a swollen mountain 
stream, that one dark and stormy night a tiny 
child came down to its brink and begged to be 
set over on the other side. Lightly the giant 



a96 SERMONS 

undertook what seemed the easy task. But, 
staggering and trembling with him amid the 
raging floods as he never had with adult weight, 
he exclaimed, when at last, faithful to his trust, 
he laid him safely on the further shore, " In 
Heaven's name, who art thou? " To which the 
reply came soft and sweet and full of reconj- 
pense, " The Christ-child, and, bearing me 
across the stream, thou hast borne the whole 
world's weight." The legend is true of all in- 
fancy. Bearing it safe across the raging 
streams of sin and wrong bears with it all that 
humanity is. It is its children forever, no 
matter what its wealth may be in saints and 
sages, who are the world's hope ; a new miracle 
which is wrought with each new one's birth, even 
though it be in poverty's manger; a new song 
of good will out of heaven which is sung over 
each new one's cradle, even though it is met on 
earth with only a hiss of shame. And faith's 
millennial year will begin and the sun of right- 
eousness start forth afresh on its mighty circle 
when the Christmas mom shall dawn on which 
religion with the same reverence with which it 
now says of Jesus : " Ecce DeusI Ecce 
Homo! " shall say not of Jesus alone, but of 
every child, Ecce Infans, — Behold the Babe ! 



II 

STAND-BYS 

I was having an exchange of pulpits a while 
ago with a brother minister in a little country, 
town of New England. It was a dark, stormy 
morning late in November. The members of 
the society, few at any time, were scattered 
through a farming community, some of them at 
considerable distance from the church; and as 
Fred, the minister's son, walked with me up 
to the building at the appointed service hour, 
the lad, with inherited ministerial anxiety, ex- 
pressed a doubt as to whether we should have 
a multitude of people assembled with us that 
day to keep holy time together. Not a person 
was to be seen at the door, not even the faithful 
janitor, not even one of the group of well- 
dressed and observant young men usually at its 
side. The long line of horse sheds was entirely 
empty. No small boy sent ahead to keep him 
out of mischief, and to save his clothes from 
destruction on the stairway banisters at home, 
was visible stoning the geese, or trying to walk 
the path of rectitude on the top of a rail fence. 

And, as I looked abroad over the wet desolation, 
297 



^98 SERMONS 

the unencouraging question arose as to whether 
the preacher himself would not have to be the 
chief part of his congregation. 

Just then in the distance, down through an 
avenue of trees tossing their branches as if in 
warning and astonishment, the glimpse was 
caught of three female figures, cloaked and um- 
brellaed, struggling with the sleet and wind in 
the direction of the church. 

" Ah, there they come," exclaimed Fred, " the 
three stand-bys ! I thought I should see them ! 
Father calls them his three stand-bys, because 
it makes no difference how hot or cold or 
stormy it is, they are always sure to be present ; 
and father knows that, even if nobody else is 
on hand, he will at any rate assuredly have them 
to hear his sermon." 

I watched the figures thus designated with no 
small degree of interest, as in a zigzag course, 
with many a tack and close hauling of the dress, 
they made their way slowly up into the meeting- 
house portal, and thence with us around the 
register into its otherwise vacant room. One 
of them was past middle life, the gray locks the 
wind had displaced falling softly over her fore- 
head ; the other two, sisters, not so old, but still 
no longer in the strength and freshness of 
youth. All three were wholesome, good-look- 
ing women, evidently of the large-hearted 
rather than strong-minded type, and with 



STAND-BYS 299 

something in their faces, a sort of divine glow, 
finer than the light of intellect, which at once 
arrested attention. It was easy to see that the 
fidelity and steadfastness from which they had 
got their title were not of the outward act 
alone, but born and nurtured in the soul; easy 
to understand how three such faces as theirs 
could light up any place, even in the darkest 
day of winter. And, as I thought of the other 
little groups like them to be found in all 
churches and all departments of life, — we had 
a few more that day, — and of the service they 
are rendering every good cause, a sermon was 
preached to me a great deal better than any- 
thing I could have said to them. 

The simple presence of such persons in a 
church is itself to every minister a powerful en- 
couragement and help. He is of course glad to 
see his occasional hearers, — the guest from 
some other denomination who drops in to learn 
his side of infinite truth; the poor mother, the 
stand-by of home, who has a breakfast and a 
husband and three or four children to attend to 
in the morning, so she can get out only now 
and then ; the young men of his ecclesiastical 
garden, rare flowers, whose eyes and religious 
natures open usually only in the latter part of 
the day, but who, once or twice a year, under 
the stimulus of a new suit of clothes, blossom 
out in the forenoon ; the religious casual, well 



300 SERMONS 

described by Horace as the small and infre- 
quent worshiper, owning, perhaps, a pew, but 
occupying it so seldom that, when used, it has 
to be found for him by the janitor ; the bevy of 
bright girls, always active at socials and church 
suppers, who remember sometimes that Sundays 
and sermons are also a part of religion; and 
the crowd of strangers who appear Sunday 
nights when it has been advertised that he is 
going to preach on " The Kingdom of Satan " 
or " The Doings of the Devil " or " The Sowing 
of Wild Oats," or some similarly sacred theme. 
But, after all, it is the stand-bys, the men, 
often old ones, and the women, often farthest 
from the church, who are absolutely certain to 
be in their places punctually at every service, 
whatever the season or the weather or the sub- 
ject of the sermon, — these that he learns to 
look upon with special delight and to find the 
sources of his greatest earthly inspiration. 
What is winter, what are rainy days, what are 
snows half a fathom deep, when he has before 
him the prospect of their bright faces looking 
up to his and their warm hearts ready to drink 
in his truth? I know of a minister who never 
goes to church with such a light step and elastic 
spirit as on stormy Sundays, sure, as he then 
is, of meeting there the picked audience, the 
sifted wheat of souls, who are present because 
they really want religious help and want at the 



STAND-BYS 301 

same time to help religion. Fred's father is a 
type of all preachers. There is none of them 
who, with three stand-bys to encourage him, 
cannot face bravely what is sometimes regarded 
as the devil's most powerful artillery, the gap- 
ing mouths of threescore empty pews. Their 
winter cloaks and brightening eyes allure him 
on amid bare walls, murky shadows, closed 
hymn-books, broken fans, and the awful echoes 
of his own voice from truth to truth and from 
charge to charge, as the white plume of Henry 
of Navarre led on his followers amid the shouts 
and groans and carnage of the battle-fields of 
France. And, when the sermon is over and he 
comes down from the pulpit, and they stop to 
shake hands with him, as real stand-bys always 
do, and ask him if it is not hard preaching to 
so few, he answers, without even a minister's 
white lie, that it is the j oiliest thing in all the 
world to preach to such a few ; and he goes home 
to his slippers and cold meat, feeling that he 
has fought a good fight, and that his seed — 
for that is what a minister's shot ought always 
to be — has fallen into good ground, even 
though it be into a patch of it no larger than 
three pews. 

Equally valuable is the attendance of such 
persons at prayer-meetings, Sunday-schools, 
sewing circles. Alliances, and at all parish 
gatherings. Numbers are nice, newcomers 



302 SERMONS 

needful, and doubtless it is well to have a reli- 
gious excitement, now and then that will bring 
into them all the floating material of the com- 
munity. But every minister, every worker, 
knows that such flood tides of interest will not, 
cannot, last. The enthusiasm dies, the crowded 
rooms thin out, and there comes a lull when 
only a few of the old plodding, never-tired 
workers are left. They are the stand-bys. 
They bridge over the intervals from excitement 
to excitement, are the only members, sometimes, 
who give societies a continuous life. They are 
not noisy, not conspicuous, not always the 
leaders and go-ahead people; and in the full 
sweep of prosperity, like the rocks on the sea- 
shore when the tide is in, are often lost sight 
of and forgotten. But, when the tide ebbs, 
when there is no minister to the society, and no 
popularity, when trouble and trial and disaster 
come, then, like the rocks, they rise again 
distinct and visible, and the society endures, en- 
dures, perhaps, as a lighthouse amid the stormy 
waves, because it has their strong souls on 
which to rest. Rev. W. H. H. Murray several 
years ago had a lecture on " Deacons," in 
which he easily raised a laugh at the two or 
three officers of this name, always on hand at 
prayer meetings, who used to stand up year 
after year to make the same long prayer, and 
give the same juiceless exhortation. But, af- 



STAND-BYS S03 

ter all, it is just such old men, always there and 
always doing their best, even though it is the 
same antiquated best, who for more than two 
hundred years in New England have kept these 
meetings in existence and afforded religion the 
limbs, whistling and bare as they were in the 
cold winter, on which to hang its leaves and 
flowers and fruit when the springtime of re- 
vivals came round again. A hard, ungrateful 
heart must that clergyman have, who does not 
love and bless these old, faithful, always-pres- 
ent souls, whether deacons or not, whose only 
gift is — as truly a divine one as any dash of 
leadership or brilliancy of prayer — simply to 
stand by him in times of loneliness, unpopu- 
larity, and spiritual deadness. 

It is not in religious matters alone, how- 
ever, that there are stormy Sundays and 
empty seats, nor in sewing circles and prayer 
meetings only that there are glacial epochs, 
ebb-tides of interest, and the need of slender 
bridges over which life's forces have to march, 
but they occur in every field where human be- 
ings are called upon to act. 

During the golden years of youth we like 
new friendships, new faces, new homes, new 
gods. The more lovers, the more popularity, 
the more changes of scene, the more happi- 
ness, it is thought. Every fresh opening is 
hailed with enthusiasm, every fresh acquaint- 



S04i SERMONS 

ance with delight. Everj good-looking girl 
outside of his own home is to the young man 
an angel, every sprucely dressed man to the 
girl a possible hero. And age, experience, 
fidelity, tried and familiar things, have no show 
then by the side of novelty, dash, and bril- 
liancy. 

But no one can go far on his way without 
finding that the real gold of friendship is not in 
the crowd, not in popularity, not in the sparkle 
of new eyes and the clasp of new hands, however 
pleasant, but rather in the two or three old 
stand-bys whose worth trouble has put to the 
test. The warm, true, faithful hearts, the men 
and women who have stood by us in the midst of 
darkness and disappointment, mistakes of 
judgment, failures in business, losses of popu- 
larity, — ay, and in the midst of our sins, — 
the stormy day friends who come to us in our 
solitude, all the more certainly because, as 
they fear, nobody else will come, — no person 
has ever known friendship, all the joy and 
strength it can give, till he has had two or 
three of such friends. It is worth meeting 
misfortune and disaster, worth losing the 
friendships of the crowd and the world, just 
to catch the gleam of their bright faces loom- 
ing up through the darkness and to feel the 
clasp of their warm hands reaching out 
through the coldness. They light up the 



STAND-BYS 305 

world's great temple with a splendor such as 
never came from the eyes of beauty; cheer us 
on amid empty purses, dismal times of trade, 
and the silence of all other songs with an in- 
spiration never breathed by the tongues of 
gathered thousands. I heard of such a one 
once, an old maid, always doing kind deeds, 
who, in addition to the twelve spools of black 
thread already in her work-basket, went down 
the village street a cold, rainy day, to buy 
still another of a merchant having a hard 
time, whose store no one else for twelve hours 
had entered, — how weakly insignificant as a 
matter of business, " but the turning point," 
said he afterwards, " of my fortune and the 
saving of my soul." Happy is that man or 
woman arriving in life's journey, some stormy 
morning, on a hill-top wKich all others, per- 
haps, have deserted, who can look down the 
avenue lined, it may be, with leafless winter 
trees, and see struggling up to him against 
the sleet and rain two or three of such old 
stand-bys. 

It is friends of this stamp that God gives 
naturally to every human being in those of the 
family and the home. The fathers and moth- 
ers, the brothers and sisters, they who have 
watched over us in our cradles, played with us 
in our childhood, grown up with us side by side 
to manhood and womanhood, their life-stream 



306 SERMONS 

one with ours ; they who, amid all faults and 
failures, have loved us simply because we were 
ourselves, drawing nearer to us with every 
stormy day of life, and whose affection some- 
times not even prison doors can shut out, — a 
heritage of devotion more or less perfect, to 
which every child of earth is born, — it is these 
who are true stand-bys, these that are worthy 
types of the fidelity and steadfastness of the 
Everlasting Love. 

And when extreme old age has come upon 
them and they can give to others no longer 
their care and devotion; when children and 
children's children have to do for them, up- 
holding their feeble steps, dressing their aged 
forms, consoling their aches and pains, and 
smoothing their way down to the last long 
slumber, not less are they deserving of the 
name. It is well-known that the tall trees of 
the orchard and forest are able to brave the 
winter's storm and lift their heads aloft in the 
summer skies, not by reason of their fresh life 
alone, which exists only in the narrow circle 
between the trunk and the bark, and is re- 
newed every season, but because they keep at 
their core, sheltered and protected by the new 
life, the old fiber stored there, some of it thirty, 
fifty, and a hundred years ago. And who has 
not known of families held together amid all 
the storms of human life and growing every 



STAND-BYS 307 

year more beautiful and saintly because they 
had at their center an old father or mother or 
grandparent folded in and cherished by the 
currents of their fresh young hearts? Thank 
God, it is not only by the love, sympathy, and 
care received that we live, but often, far more, 
by those which we give. Children never grow 
up so nobly and well, homes are never so genial 
and lovely, as when there are aged and, it may 
be, invalid forms among them, mourning, per- 
haps, that their life-work is over, because they 
can no longer care for others, but doing, per- 
haps, the best part of it in being cared for 
themselves. And unwise, as well as ungrate- 
ful, is that boy or girl, that man or woman, 
gone out into the rush and glitter of the world 
and rejoicing there in other friendships and 
other loves, who does not remember and cher- 
ish the old father and mother left at home, 
and keep the paths still open and worn which 
lead back to their doors and to their hearts. 

Of a similar character is the blessedness 
which is possible for the ripeness and old age 
of wedded life. The theories and practices 
which make the marriage relation only a part- 
nership to be dissolved at pleasure, whatever 
else may be said in their favor, strike a deadly 
blow at an element in it which has the possibil- 
ity, as time goes on, of becoming supreme over 
all others. Marriage in some of its practical 



308 SERMONS 

manifestations is undeniably the occasion of 
an immense amount of misery, crime, injus- 
tice, and down-dragging, is one of the most 
perplexing institutions with which society and 
religion have to deal ; but in its ideal shape, of 
all the evidences of God's goodness to be found 
on this earth, all the indications that he cares 
for human beings with the love of a Father, as 
well as with the wisdom of a Creator, there is 
none quite equal to his providing for them a 
relation between the sexes in which the mem- 
bers of each are moved by the strongest of all 
ties to stand by those of the other in all the 
varied scenes of human life. If it is an ideal 
not always realized in full, it is one that is ap- 
proached a great deal oftener than those who 
satirize it are willing to allow. Many a 
couple living together thirty, forty, fifty 
years, have found that the most blessed part 
of their union was not the romance and splen- 
dor of its early days, not the richer develop- 
ment which it gave all through to their char- 
acters, not even the children who were 
gathered around its shrine, but the intimacy 
and reliability of its companionship, the fact 
that it gave them each in the other a near and 
faithful stand-by, — a blessing coming to 
them the fullest when the fervor of youth had 
gone, and their children had left the home 
nest, and amid the chills of age they stood on 



STAND-BYS 309 

the threshold of the great eternal house. " I 
had a happy marriage," said a lady, " but its 
happiest memory is what I did for my husband 
in his long final sickness, as I think it was also 
his happiest experience that I was with him to 
do it." And, apart from all questions of mor- 
ality, who, if he is wise and wants the best the 
two sexes can give, would make marriage the 
transitory affair that would take out of its 
vows this stand-by element? 

Stand-bys are usually thought of as con- 
servatives upholding the past, and having no 
part to perform in revolutions, reforms, and 
the progress of society into new fields of truth 
and duty ; and indeed all such movements are 
sure to find men in plenty who in the lower 
meaning of the words stand by when they are 
going on, — stand by with indifference and let 
others do their work, or stand by as Saul did 
at the martyrdom of Stephen, consenting to 
see them stoned and holding the raiment of 
those who do the stoning. 

Yet even in progress and reform the op- 
portunity and need are not lacking — yea, are 
imperative and abundant — for those, also, 
who will stand by them in the better sense of 
being their active and steadfast friends. For 
progress and reform are like trees of the gar- 
den. To put forth new leaves and bear new 
fruit they must have a trunk of unchanging 



SIO SERMONS 

principles, those of justice, liberty, right, and 
humanity, on which for the new leaves and 
fruit to grow; and they who stand by these 
principles when men, and perhaps nations, are 
tempted to forsake them in the pursuit of 
some seeming good, why is not their work as 
valuable for progress and reform as that 
of the men who grow on them the world's im- 
proved conditions? 

Nor are the new movements themselves en- 
tirely without need of their special kind of 
help. It is not the dashing leaders, the bril- 
liant orators, and the advanced thinkers 
alone, important as their service is, who con- 
stitute the whole force by which the success 
of a cause is won; but the sturdy men and 
women who, when the first enthusiasm for it 
has cooled off, and persecution, or, what is 
worse, indifference, has come in, go up all the 
same into its sanctuary and give it and give 
its leaders the cheer of their two or three 
bright faces and faithful hearts, they who not 
only stand up for it, but stand by it, — their 
work, surely, which is to be counted in. 

We smile sometimes in reading Virgil's 
Mneid at the way in which his " fidus 
Achates," " fortis Gyas," " fortis Cleanthus," 
characters having but one attribute, appear 
again and again in its scenes as actors with 
the " pius ^neas " ; but the story in this re- 



STAND-BYS 311 

spect is in perfect accord with actual life, 
every hero being supported in his progress by 
a few just such faithful comrades. " What 
good can I do here? " many a man and woman 
has mournfully asked in going to a temperance 
meeting or Anti-slavery convention, or other 
reformatory gathering, where they had no abil- 
ity to speak, no possibility of making further 
conversions, and no new thing to hear. The 
good of standing by them is the answer, one 
of the greatest goods of all. The plan of 
Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, as is 
well known, was simply to form his regiments 
in hollow squares, and then exhaust the enemy 
by repelling the attacks made against them. 
Again and again his squares were assailed with 
all the dash and brilliancy of a Frenchman's 
charge. In vain: their efforts were like the 
rush of the sea against the sharp angles of its 
granite shore, the legions which made them 
being broken and rolled back in the foam and 
spray of human blood. " Hard pounding 
this," said the Iron Duke, as he threw himself 
into one of these fortresses of living hearts, 
" but it all turns on who can stand pounding 
the longest." And Waterloo's bloody field was 
gained, one of the sixteen decisive battles in the 
world's history, because Englishmen that day 
stood pounding the longest, or, in other words, 
were such good stand-bys. So in the world's 



312 SERMONS 

great moral battles the men who can form 
themselves into hollow squares, squares whose 
lines are trued by the everlasting right, and in 
the darkness and discouragement of the bat- 
tle's pelting rain have learned the tactics of 
standing firmly by their cause, and of standing 
longest the pelting of their foes, — they are the 
ones who will remain at last masters of the 
field. 

All honor, then, in the church, in the home, 
in the world, and in the battle-fields of truth 
and right, to those whose genius and mission 
are to be simply stand-bys. They may not 
win always the laurels of earth, their position 
may be less strikingly brilliant than that of the 
world's inspirers and leaders, and sometimes 
they may be despised and laughed at by their 
restless brothers, — sometimes may despise 
themselves, but not the less they are the Lord's 
anointed, not the less the doers for him of a 
precious work. And, when the end comes and 
the laurels for the eternal years are given out, 
the Lord of the whole earth, whose causes they 
have stood by here, will in turn stand by them 
there ; and out of thin churches and wearisome 
prayer-meetings and long years of faithful 
service in the home, and out from the world's 
great battle-fields, they shall be called up to the 
front ranks of honor, and be stand-bys forever 
around the eternal throne. 



Ill 

LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY AND 
LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 

One of the most frequent questions Liberal 
Christianity has to meet when it goes forth 
now to establish new churches, and to push for- 
ward its work, is that of its need any longer 
as a distinct religious organization. Fifty 
years ago its ideas stood out in violent con- 
trast with those of other denominations, and, 
whether it was believed in or not, there could 
be no doubt that the ground on which it stood 
in the world of thought was exclusively its own. 
But in our time the lines which separate it 
from other churches have in many places al- 
most entirely faded away. The whole reli- 
gious world during the past generation has 
become liberalized as it never was before. Elo- 
quent, scholarly, and broad-minded Orthodox 
preachers are to be found in almost every com- 
munity, setting forth more or less of what was 
once known as pre-eminently Unitarian and 
Universalist truth ; beautiful, well-equipped and 
hospitable Orthodox churches in almost every 
village opening their doors to welcome equally 
313 



314 SERMONS 

all comers to fill their pews, enjoy their wor- 
ship, and help pay their bills. And amid such 
a state of things it is asked, Why should 
Liberal churches, one of whose aims is to get 
rid, so far as possible, of sectarian lines, seek 
to perpetuate their denominational existence? 
Why not go into these new Orthodox churches, 
and join hearts and hands with their members 
in doing what seems to be their common work? 
Said the clergyman of such a church a while 
ago, in a city where there are several of like 
character, to the minister of a new Unitarian 
society, who had complained to him of the 
practical disfellowship he had received, " It is 
because we think you Unitarians had no call 
to set up another society here on the ground of 
Liberalism, and our people feel a little ' put 
upon ' by your tone in making such a claim 
over them." And there are many Unitarians 
themselves who look at the matter in the same 
way. They have pleasant relations all the 
week with their Orthodox neighbors ; their sen- 
sibilities are rarely jarred by anything in the 
preaching and worship they hear in Orthodox 
churches ; and they very naturally say, " Why, 
then, be at all the trouble, expense, and ap- 
parent inconsistency of setting up and main- 
taining a separate and perhaps insignificant 
Liberal society? " 

It is a question which deserves a fair an- 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 315 

swer. If these other churches are doing the 
full work of Liberal Religion, if there is no 
large, distinct, and positive want in human 
hearts and in general society which Unitarian 
and Universalist societies can satisfy better 
than all others, no way in which earnest- 
hearted men and women can work for the king- 
dom of God more consistently and more suc- 
cessfully in organizations of their own than in 
those of a broad Orthodoxy, then unhesita- 
tingly these other churches have a right to feel 
" put upon " by our presence and our claims, 
and have a right to ask that our time, toil, and 
money shall be put in with theirs for religious 
service, rather than be used for perpetuating 
a useless sect. So in this paper I address my- 
self to considering candidly the need of Liberal 
Christianity in the midst of Liberal Orthodoxy. 
I. It is needed because with the Liberal 
faith it aims to give, for its holding, the 
Liberal form. There is indeed no denying the 
sweetness, breadth, catholicity, and genuine- 
ness of a large element of what is called 
Liberal Orthodoxy, an element which is found 
alike in Baptist, Congregational, Episcopal, 
and Methodist churches. It has the new wine 
of Liberalism, has it sometimes in its richest, 
finest flavor, — has it, I am free to say, in a 
far better condition than many of our stag- 
nant Unitarian societies have. Its preaching 



316 SERMONS 

for the most part is up with the times, is in 
harmony with science, and is as little bound by 
the mere letter of Scripture as God's sunlight 
is with a parrot's iron cage. Its ministers — 
I say it from long acquaintance with some of 
them — are as genial, large-hearted, and com- 
panionable men as are to be found anywhere 
on the face of the earth ; and though now and 
then, under some special disturbing influence, 
they may lapse for a moment, not into the old 
doctrines but into the old phrases and methods, 
yet, as soon as the pressure is removed, like a 
steel spring they are back again to their true 
selves and to this nineteenth century. Uni- 
tarianism denies with all possible emphasis that 
it claims to be the exclusive representative any- 
where of Liberal thought. So far as the 
thought is concerned it is glad to believe that 
there is hardly a single point at which it is not 
paralleled, if not in degree, yet in spirit, by 
Liberal Orthodoxy. 

But how is it in passing from the thought 
to the theology, from the sermon to the creed, 
from the living faith to the lettered form? 
Why, there is hardly one of these churches 
which does not have for its confession — a con- 
fession which its minister and often its private 
members in uniting with it are obliged to assent 

to the same old theology, with all its rigidity 

and horror, which in past ages has borne so 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 317 

terribly on the human soul. Having occasion, 
not long ago, to examine the creeds of the dif- 
ferent churches in a city somewhat noted for 
its Liberal Orthodoxy, I found them made up 
of the very doctrines — some in one and some 
in another, softened it may be in their setting, 
but as hard, narrow, and repulsive as ever in 
their substance — that the pioneers of Liberal- 
ism were fighting against fifty years ago : such, 
for instance, as original sin, total depravity, 
the infallibility of all Scripture, the tri-person- 
ality of the Godhead, salvation by sovereign 
grace alone, the resurrection of the body, ever- 
lasting damnation, and the like, — down even 
to those about the corrupt nature, and God's 
wrath against it, of little children. Religion's 
new wine is put by them in theology's old bot- 
tles, the liberty with which Christ made men 
free entangled again in the slave's yoke of 
bondage, the live man of belief bound, as in the 
ancient mode of punishment, to the corpse of a 
dead faith. And it is here, rather than in the 
belief itself, that we come to the real differ- 
ence between Liberal Orthodoxy and Liberal 
Christianity, — here that we begin to find the 
need of the one even in the midst of the other. 
Such doctrines, to be sure, are not empha- 
sized by it now as they were of old by those 
who believed literally in tlieir awful signifi- 
cance; indeed are often kept almost entirely in 



S18 SERMONS 

the backgTOund, like a superannuated or im- 
becile relative in a polite family, while only the 
youthful, well-dressed Liberalism is brought to 
the front ; but now and then the two things, by 
some malign accident, will come together, — 
right in company, too, and often into a most 
painful contrast with each other. A friend 
tells me that a while ago he dropped into a 
Liberal Orthodox church where the pastor was 
preaching a sermon on the nature of the resur- 
rection. It gave up the whole of the old idea 
of a bodily rising, and was as broad, philosoph- 
ical, and spiritual as the most advanced 
thinker could wish, a credit alike to the preach- 
er's heart and head. My friend listened to it 
with the utmost delight, and said to himself, 
What now is the need of Unitarianism, when 
Orthodoxy is preaching such sermons as this? 
Just then he happened to glance from the 
preacher's lips to the church's creed written out 
on the wall in the background, and there his 
eye fell at once on the words, " / believe in the 
resurrection of the body.*' If the corpse of 
some old acquaintance long buried had actually 
come forth and stood in all its ghastliness by 
the side of the living preacher, the difference 
between them could hardly have been more 
startling than it was between the dead and the 
living faith ; and the gentleman came away 
more impressed than ever with the importance 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 319 

of a church where there is no danger of such 
resurrections. 

Still worse is the contrast when a deliberate 
profession of these old creeds is made the con- 
dition of church membership, as it still is in 
many cases, to men and women who in their 
hearts are holding* the new faith. I knew a 
young girl who while living in a Unitarian 
family had imbibed Liberal sentiments, but 
whose mother was Orthodox in her faith, and 
who naturally wished in her religious connec- 
tion to be united with her parent in the same 
church. She told her minister, a noted Liberal 
Orthodox preacher, what her situation was, and 
he assured her that, so long as she had a per- 
sonal faith in Christ himself, her special doc- 
trinal belief on other points would make no dif- 
ference about her admission to Christ's fold. 
Judge of her feelings, however, when, standing 
up in the broad aisle with a score of others to 
be received, there was read for her to assent to, 
besides the church covenant, a list of nearly 
forty theological articles. Being a modest 
girl, unwilling to make a scene, she allowed her 
assent to be implied; but it was with a terrible 
wrench to her moral nature ; and writing to her 
grandmother about it afterwards she told her 
that of the whole forty articles there was only 
one she positively believed, and that with re- 
gard to the larger part of them she could not 



320 SERMONS 

even understand the meaning of the words. 
Now, in all earnestness and solemnity, what 
kind of way is this with which to begin that 
Christian life which beyond everything else de- 
mands of its followers perfect sincerity? Of 
course, if people really believe these harsh 
creeds, there is no objection to their saying so. 
All doctrines are but the vessels in which to 
hold God's truth, the tools with which to do 
God's work; and, if some persons find the old 
ones are better adapted for their wants than 
the new, there is no genuine Liberalism which 
will not say that the old ones ought to be used, 
and which will not respect their users. But to 
impose a deliberate profession of them on 
young minds that know nothing about their 
meaning, and whose real faith is wholly the 
other way, as the imperative condition of their 
coming to Christ, and that, too, in the most 
solemn moment of human life, what is it but an 
outrage on the very name of faith which not 
only every lover of liberty, but every friend of 
honesty and truthfulness, ought to denounce.? 
And yet how many thousands of people there 
are every year who are made to enter the church 
with just such a lie on their lips; how many 
church members who, if they worship at all, are 
compelled to stand up Sunday after Sunday 
and repeat a creed about the resurrection of 
the body, the birth of Jesus Christ from a vir- 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 321 

gin, and his descent into hell, the evidence of 
which they have never spent one single hour 
in examining; how many business men, who on 
becoming Christians are obliged to support 
doctrines, ay, and to utter sentiments in pray- 
ers, to be charged with which in the counting- 
room or on the street they would resent as a 
foul slander. 

Of course I know very well the methods by 
which men try to reconcile their consciences to 
such professions ; know they are told that the 
resurrection of the body means of the spirit- 
ual body, total depravity totally imperfect, a 
trinity of persons a trinity of manifestations, 
and the like, know how mental reservations and 
such modifications as " for substance of doc- 
trine " are put in for the sake of sensitive moral 
natures. But what is this but the covering up 
a lie's body with a truth's garment, a form in 
which it is infinitely more corrupting than when 
it stands out in its own nakedness? What but 
the teaching in religion of that very principle 
which leads in society at large to the stamping 
of a piece of paper with the word dollar, and 
then using it as the means with which to pay 
a debt which was contracted in solid coin; to 
the treating of grease and tallow with a few 
chemicals so as to make them look well, and then 
selling the compound for our tables as genuine 
butter, and to the signing of obligations or 



322 SERMONS 

the swearing of oaths, and then the repudia- 
tion of their force under the plea of a differ- 
ent meaning to the terms? If every one is to 
be allowed to put his own private interpreta- 
tion on language, as Liberal Orthodoxy is 
teaching men to do in their creeds, what form 
of bargain can ever be made binding? Words 
are sacred things. The sanctity of all obli- 
gations depends in a large measure on their 
sacredness. Every member of society who 
would keep out of it a sea of falsehood is as 
much interested in having them untouched as 
every Hollander is that no one shall meddle 
with his dikes. The man who can bring him- 
self to tamper with the meaning of words in 
the solemn profession of his faith before God 
has acquired a habit which must inevitably 
prove to him a terrible temptation in his rela- 
tions with men. And is it not just here that 
we find the explanation of why so many church 
members are false and frail in their business af- 
fairs and in their domestic relations ; the ex- 
planation, too, of why so many persons in the 
world at large, seeing how easy it is for pro- 
fessed Christians to hold one thing in their 
creeds and another in their hearts, have lost 
faith in all religion, and concluded that its pro- 
fessions are all of the same character, full and 
fair to the eyes, quibbled away and meaning 
nothing to the understanding? The new wine 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 323 

has been put in the old bottles, and Christ's 
words about it have been fulfilled, — the bot- 
tles bursting, and the wine, the precious wine 
of religion, itself, spilled. 

Then, too, though there are many Christians 
on whose souls these solemn professions sit very 
lightly, many who seem to think that church 
vows, like lovers' vows, Jove laughs at, there 
are others who cannot reconcile their con- 
sciences to such a Protean use of language ; and 
then, alas ! their lives too often become a long, 
long conflict between the leadings of the spirit 
and the bondage of the letter. 

Who now will say that in such a state of 
things there is not need, real soul need, of a 
church into which men and women can come 
with no other condition imposed upon them 
than that simply of a hunger and thirst after 
righteousness and truth, and an honest and 
free soul in their pursuit ; a church which, hav- 
ing dropped the old theology, drops with it 
the old theological creeds ; a church in which 
men are not only free to think for themselves, 
but free to choose the expression of their 
thought; a church which believes that truth- 
fulness is a more important element of religion 
than even truth, and an honest doubt a more 
sacred thing in the sight of God than any hol- 
low faith.? If you should go down South and 
find that the negroes there made free by the 



SM SERMONS 

President's proclamation, and entitled by our 
laws to all the immunities of American citizens, 
were still keeping possession of their old man- 
acles and chains, and still feeling obliged with 
every feast-day and every coming among them 
of a new member to put them on as a symbol of 
what they ought always to wear, would you 
not say that the work of emancipation was not 
yet complete, — say that there was need of 
some one to go there and proclaim that Ameri- 
can citizenship meant not only freedom from 
slavery itself, but freedom from all its badges 
and signs? And this is the kind of work 
Liberal Christianity is trying to do for the 
citizens of Christ's kingdom, this one of the 
points in which it goes beyond its friend Liberal 
Orthodoxy, and in which it finds its need, — re- 
lieving men not only of the old bondage, but of 
the old bonds ; giving them not only the new 
wine of Liberalism, but, as the vessels in which 
to hold it, the new words of liberty; making 
discipleship its only condition of membership, 
and saying to each one of its followers, " Form 
your own creed, utter it in your own speech, 
and above all other truth be yourself a true 
man." 

11. The second great reason why Liberal 
Christianity is needed, even in the midst of 
Liberal Orthodoxy, is that, it furnishes the only 
possible ground on which all churches can come 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 325 

into practical fellowship with each other, and 
the only possible tie by which they can be held 
together as one organic body.. The ground of 
fellowship they have striven for hitherto, as is 
well known, has been that of outward, formal 
unity, unity of doctrine, ritual, and polity, the 
tie that of symbol and creed. And what has 
been the result? Division', persecution, hatred, 
weakness, almost every quality that is the op- 
posite of a genuine Christian union. 

Look at the religious world to-day, at the 
innumerable sects into which it is divided, per- 
meating every little town and village, at the 
antagonism and strife of its different parts 
against each other rather than against sin, and 
at the enormous expense involved in simply the 
keeping up of its multiplied organizations ; and 
how far removed is it from that one body, set 
forth by the New Testament as its type of 
union, in which those members thought to be 
less honorable receive more abundant honor, 
and in which they all have the same care of 
each other! 

And this state of things must continue, from 
the nature of the case, so long as mere outward 
likeness of any kind, whether of doctrine, ritual, 
or polity, is insisted on as their ground of 
union. God has so constituted our minds in 
their very nature that they never can be true 
to themselves and true to him and see things, 



326 SERMONS 

especially the great things of religion, all in 
the same light. The moment men begin to 
think and act they begin inevitably to differ; 
and the more vigorous and free the thoughts 
and actions are, the wider apart their results 
are certain to be. Liberal Orthodoxy, to be 
sure, may do much to smooth over and soften 
these differences and to bring those affected 
by them into relations of kindness and human- 
ity with each other ; but the very fact that it is 
Orthodoxy at all — that is, that it makes a 
right faith the connecting link of its members 
— renders it a negative work and prevents it 
from uniting those, the larger part of all 
Christendom, whose faiths, from the nature of 
their minds, are radically different. So with 
Liberalism alone of every kind. It never can 
unite. Its whole mission is to dissolve, to al- 
low every man independent of every other to 
form his own creed, and to reduce the religious 
world, as it is fast doing under Protestantism,, 
to a mere mass of individuals, as incoherent and 
unorganized as a bed of sand. 

What is wanted, evidently, is some other 
principle to go with this, something that while 
giving to each man the right of private judg- 
ment and of making his own creed. Orthodox, 
Roman Catholic, Unitarian, or Jewish, recog- 
nizing and honoring the peculiarities of each, 
will at the same time supply the link deeper and 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 527 

diviner than any doctrine, ritual, or polity, 
which can bind these parts, bind their very 
differences, all together in one grand organic 
whole. And that principle beyond question is 
given to the world in Christianity. The gos- 
pel, in its subtlest essence, is not a doctrine, not 
a set of rules and forms, not a church organi- 
zation, but a unifying, life-giving spirit, ready 
to permeate all doctrines, all rites, all churches, 
just as the human spirit does the human body. 
It is love, not creed, which is stated in the 
most explicit terms to be its connecting bond ; 
the human body, consisting of many diverse 
members, which is given as the type of its out- 
ward form; having the spirit of Christ repre- 
sented as what makes us his ; the doctrine of 
the Holy Spirit its great transcendent idea, 
and the unity of the spirit the object it keeps 
in view, — the one faith sometimes spoken of 
being a subjective, spiritual quality, not an ob- 
jective creed. 

And it is the putting together of these two 
principles. Liberalism on the one hand making 
many members, and the spirit of Christ on the 
other uniting all these members, down even to 
the least, in one organic whole, which consti- 
tutes Liberal Christianity. It gives up, as you 
see, the whole Orthodox idea of making a right 
faith, the whole Presbyterian and Roman 
Catholic idea of making a right polity, and the 



328 SERMONS 

whole Baptist and Episcopal idea of making 
a right ritual, its ground of fellowship and 
bond of union, and turns for them within ; finds 
them in their common spirit and animating 
principle; finds them in that Christian love 
which under all beliefs, rituals, and polities is 
one and the same ; finds them in that broad 
Christian living to whicH all sects were meant 
to contribute a vital part. It is the only plat- 
form on which all Christendom by the laws of 
our human nature can come into fellowship; 
and just because Liberal Orthodoxy and 
Liberalism in all its secular forms is doing its 
work so well, — the work of making men free, 
— who does not see that Liberal Christianity is 
needed all the more as furnishing the tie with 
which to hold them together, many members in 
one body, the great natural and scriptural type 
of a perfect union. 

III. But free thought and spiritual unity 
are very far from being the only objects of 
Christianity. They are merely the beginning, 
merely the tools. Beyond and above them is 
its work of saving, uplifting, and sanctifying 
the world, and of unifying the human race ; and 
it is here that I find the third great need of its 
Liberal form. The one supreme object of the 
church hitherto has been to save individual 
souls, and to save them more especially out of 
a hell and into a heaven thought to exist on the 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 329 

other side of the grave. Prepare to die; pre- 
pare to meet thy God ; turn or bum, — these 
have been its rallying cries ; and the great wide 
world itself, in which these souls have lived, 
with all its myriad interests, has been repre- 
sented as under the Divine curse, destined in a 
few short years to be destroyed with fire, and 
utterly unworthy of a moment's religious 
thought otherwise than to be abused and 
scorned. This old idea itself of a lost earth 
trembling on the verge of a fiery fate has in a 
measure passed away, but the type of Christi- 
anity which grew out of it, the saving pre- 
eminently of the individual soul, and the do- 
ing of everything with reference to a future 
state, — this still remains as the characteristic 
of many Orthodox churches, even of those 
which in other respects are emphatically 
Liberal. Religion is made by it a thing apart 
from life; the intimate connection of body, 
mind, and soul, sacred and secular, market and 
meetingi-house, the growth of com and the 
spread of virtue, recognized now in all true 
philosophy, is largely ignored ; and its churches 
are used for worship alone, pointing with their 
steeples away from earth, and looking down 
with stony walls and darkened windows six days 
of the week on all the interests and struggles of 
this great, weary, toiling world. 

Look at the relation of this type of Ortho- 



330 SERMONS 

doxy to reforms, such reforms, for instance, as 
anti-slavery, temperance, the uplifting of 
women, kindness to animals, the advancement of 
science, and the suppression of vice — apart 
from some noble exceptions, what help in their 
infancy and unpopularity, when help is es- 
pecially needed, have they ever had from its 
hand? A gentleman of the city where I live, 
himself a professed Orthodox believer, was talk- 
ing with me a while ago about what could be 
done towards shutting up a den of shame in its 
midst notoriously leading young men by 
scores into vice, and I suggested that it would 
be well first of all to enlist the aid of the 
churches. " The last thing of all to appeal 
to," said he ; " we can get the help of their in- 
dividual members, noble men and women, by the 
hundred ; but the churches themselves — you 
might as well try to drink milk with the great 
dipper in Ursa Major, or pay for the sweep- 
ing of the streets with the gold in sunset skies, 
as try to get the churches' influence for any 
earthly work ; they are too much taken up with 
saving souls from hell to do anything about 
saving cities from vice." He may have stated 
their inefficiency in somewhat exaggerated 
language for general application, but, alas! 
are not his words too true of many of them 
with reference not to one vice alone, but to 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 331 

almost everything which concerns our common 
earthly morals? 

Far be it from me in saying this to criticise 
these sister churches for thus devoting them- 
selves to worship, piety, and soul-saving. I 
believe fully in such work, believe it is a side of 
religion there is a divine need of somebody's at- 
tending to ; and I thank God he has placed men 
on earth who have the taste and talent for its 
doing. But with this world and the human 
race here as the field and stock out of which 
souls age after age are growing; with hells of 
vice, sin, and wrong right under the very 
shadow of our churches as deep and damnable 
as anything Dante ever dreamed of ; with thou- 
sands of human beings every year going down 
before our very eyes into their pits of moral 
death; and with all parts of our nature and 
all the interests of society, earthly and heavenly, 
bound together with indissoluble ties so that 
the one cannot be saved without saving the 
other, — is there not, I ask, the need of a 
Christianity to go with that of the churches 
which is broad and liberal enough to take in all 
this work ; a Christianity which aims to save for 
time as well as for eternity, save humanity it- 
self as well as individual men, save homes, cities, 
nations, and society out of vice as well as souls 
out of sin ; a Christianity not ashamed to plant 



332 SERMONS 

itself at the forefront of unpopular reform, 
and which when it sees any human interest 
fallen among thieves, wounded and half-dead, 
and priest and Levite go by on the other side, is 
Good Samaritan enough to cross over with its 
oil and wine to where the victim is ; a Christian- 
ity, in short, which writes over its door side by 
side with the first great command of love to 
God, the second, as in very truth like unto it, 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself? 

Fred Douglass tells the story in his autobi- 
ography that in his early life when a slave at 
the South he used to pray with all the earnest- 
ness of his soul that God would give him free- 
dom. Month after month and year after year 
he prayed in this way, but still the freedom did 
not come. At last one day, while thus plead- 
ing with all his soul before God, he heard a 
voice out of heaven whispering to him, " Pray 
with your legs, Fred, pray with your legs ; " 
and obeying this divine behest, in thirty days 
the prayer was answered, and Fred Douglass 
was a free man. So now, while our brethren are 
wrestling with their souls in prayer before God 
that he will free them and the world from the 
slavery of sin, is there not need at least of 
some churches that will hear again the divine 
words, " Pray with your legs, pray with your 
arms, pray with your whole bodies, as well as 
with your hearts ^^? 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 333 

One night during the war I was in an ocean 
steamer off Cape Hatteras in the midst of, a 
terrible gale, the wind blowing us directly to- 
wards the foam-covered lee shore. The cap- 
tain stood on the ship's bridge full of anxiety; 
two pilots were at the helm, every mate and 
sailor at his place. The huge vessel creaked 
and groaned, plunged and reared in the waves, 
and heaved from side to side like a living crea- 
ture writhing in some awful agony. The sky 
looked wild as hell; the wind shrieked like de- 
mons through rigging and shroud; and every 
now and then there came on board, like a mon- 
ster of the deep, a huge torrent of water. It 
was impossible to remain on deck, and after try- 
ing it a few moments I went below, stopping on 
my way to look in at the engine-room. Down 
there stood the two engineers calmly at their 
work, oiling the machinery, watching the time 
it made, and giving now and then an order to 
the stokers heaving in coal to the furnaces still 
further down. Every bit of brass and steel 
was shining with light ; the clock ticked gently 
in its place, and steadily as a sleeping child's 
pulse the piston plied back and forth and the 
huge walking-beam trod up and down. Just 
then the captain appeared at the window: 
" Engineer," said he, " how are your engines ? 
I have done all I can on deck. Every rag of 
sail is blown away, and we are barely holding 



S34 SERMONS 

our own against this miserable sea. Cape Hat- 
ter as lights are down under our lee ; and if any- 
thing in your engines gives out, we are surely 
lost. This ship and its eleven hundred men all 
depend on you." " All right," replied the en- 
engineer, " I will do my part " ; and then he and 
his companion looked at the steam-gauge, tried 
the stop-cocks, gave another order to the 
stokers, wiped away the bits of lint from the 
shafting, and turned on at the joints a few^ more 
drops of oil. And it was because those en- 
gineers and stokers down there in the hold, 
where they could not see light of land or sky, 
did their work faithfully and well, that the 
grand old ship with its thousand .men, a whole 
regiment of soldiers, came safely through the 
gale and added their strength to the Union 
forces of North Carolina. 

So with this great world-ship of ours caught 
off the foaming capes of sin, blown upon with 
all the gales of passion, and writhing and toss- 
ing with sorrow, vice, and wrong; if it is ever 
to come through to the great celestial haven 
with its freight of a myriad souls all saved, as 
I believe it wall, it must be not only by the reli- 
gion on deck which guides the helm, watches the 
far-off heavenly lights, and trims the sails of 
prayer to catch the spirit's breath, but by the 
religion which is humble enough to include with 
this the work lower down of regulating the fires 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 335 

of bodily appetite, wiping away the stain of 
corruption from its shafting in the market, oil- 
ing the joints of labor and capital, and seeing 
to it that the great walking-beams of commerce, 
manufactures, and trade tread back and forth 
true to Heaven's eternal law. And when a little 
company of such religionists come into any 
community to help this work, who shall say they 
are not needed there, — who that their brethren 
higher up, managing the steeples and watching 
the heavens, have any reason to feel " put 
upon " by their presence, or to refuse them their 
fellowship ? 

Such are some of the grounds on which 
Liberal Christianity believes that in the world 
everywhere, and not less so at the very side of 
the most liberal Orthodox churches, there is still 
a call for its own peculiar work. It does not 
antagonize or undervalue these other churches. 
It recognizes that their faces are set towards 
the same light as its own, that their hearts are 
throbbing with a kindred life, and their hands 
sharers with it in one larger task. But in 
every army there must be the pioneers, the 
vanguard, and sometimes the forlorn hope ; and 
its aim is to act as these in the army of the 
Lord. The principles which others carry out 
in part, its idea is to carry out in full ; the work 
which they are doing, burdened with ancient 
traditions, it would take up in the freedom of 



336 SERMONS 

the spirit ; the new wine they are offering to 
the world in old bottles it would set before it 
in forms which are fresh and strong with all the 
philosophy and science of our own time. The 
difference between them is well expressed in their 
very names, Liberal Orthodoxy and Liberal 
Christianity, the one emphasizing a right be- 
lief, the other a larger word standing not only 
for belief, but for love, righteousness, truth- 
seeking, practical work, and the unity of the 
spirit. It is the true place for multitudes who 
are now in the ranks of Liberal Orthodoxy, the 
place to which the ultimatum of their own prin- 
ciples will surely bring them, and which for 
their sakes, therefore, ought always to be kept 
open. The men and women of our own faith 
can feel that in putting their time, toil, and 
money into the support of its churches and the 
advancement of its interests, they are putting 
them not into a dead or dying cause, not into a 
sectarianism whose outward growth must be at 
the expense of its own inward life, but into a 
movement which is alive with all that is broadest 
and best in the religion of to-day, and on whose 
platform all other believers can consistently 
stand equally with themselves. It is the nat- 
ural standard for all young people, all brave, 
earnest, progressive minds who in their march 
to heaven want to keep step with the onward 
march of this world, to rally around ; is the nat- 



LIBERAL ORTHODOXY 337 

ural position for all lovers of their kind, who 
want not only to work for truth and reform, 
but to do it under the inspiration of religious 
sentiment and amid the associations and memo- 
ries of a religious home, to take. And so long 
as there are these classes in society and this 
work to be done on earth, no matter what prog- 
ress Liberal Orthodoxy may make, there will be 
for their sakes a need and place for Liberal 
Christianity. 



IV 

A DEDICATION SERMON 

OMAHA, 1871 

Who commanded you to build this house and 
make up these walls? And they returned answer 
saying, We are the servants of the God of heaven 
and earth, and build the house that was builded 
these many years ago. — Ezra v, 9-11. 

Thus saith Jesus to those Jews who believed on 
him: If ye continue in my word then are ye my 
disciples indeed. — John viii, 31. 

Christian Friends : It gives me pleasure 
amid all the other evidences of enterprise and 
thrift that I see rising up so wonderfully in this 
new community to congratulate you on the com- 
pletion of another place of worship, and with 
my brother in the household of our liberal faith, 
whose energy and patience and genius for hard 
work have carried your movement on thus far 
to success, to bid you welcome this first time 
within its walls. 

You know what is the special object to which 

the services of the present occasion are to be 

devoted. The architect has wisely planned the 

house for the conveniences of public worship. 
338 



A DEDICATION SERMON 339 

The builders have wrought his idea honestly 
and faithfully, it is to be trusted, into the stone 
and brick and wood of its outward shape. The 
hand of taste has touched its windows and walls 
with pleasant and cheerful colors, and scattered 
here and there its modest and appropriate 
adornments. You yourselves have put into it 
the hope, and, perhaps, the sacrifice that are 
already something of the interest, and faith, 
needed to cement its parts together as a spirit- 
ual home. We feel, however, that all these ele- 
ments, important as they are, have not yet made 
it a church. There is need of its consecration, 
need of a finish to the seats, a beauty in the 
walls, a light in the windows, a warmth in the 
air, a grace in the shape and ornament such as 
no power of art can give, such as can 'spring 
only from the touch of the Eternal Spirit, need 
that the unseen owner come and make it his ; 
and it is for this purpose, the formal surrender 
of it to God, and to the great ends and object 
of religious worship that we have met here to- 
day. 

But the question arises, what is our worship? 
What the faith in which we are to dedicate it? 
What the thing it is to stand for in this com- 
munity? Is it truly and distinctively a Chris- 
tian temple? Are we to meet in it emphatically 
as a band of Christian worshipers? Is it in- 
deed the God of heaven and earth who has com- 



340 SERMONS 

manded us, as he did his servants of old to 
build its walls, build it as a part of the unseen 
temple that was builded these many years ago? 
You all know the estimate as to these points 
in which our denomination is held by a large 
part of the religious world. We are not rec- 
ognized by the great body of Protestant 
churches as truly and distinctively Christians ; 
are separated from them not only in doctrine, 
but in fellowship and communion; are made to 
occupy a position widely different from that in 
which they stand to each other, and to the 
world at large — oftentimes one of entire isola- 
tion. The Congregationalists, the Baptists, 
the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and even 
here and there a brave-hearted Episcopalian 
will venture occasionally to fellowship with 
each other, to exchange pulpits, and to unite 
in common religious movements ; but, how- 
ever much they may differ in other respects, 
they are all alike agreed in leaving the profes- 
sors of Unitarianism outside of their commun- 
ion. We are called deniers of the Lord Jesus, 
spoken of and treated preeminently as heretics. 
The only pulpits in all Christendom with which 
ours can exchange, with only the rarest excep- 
tions, are those of our twin brethren and twin 
sufferers, the Universalists. The Young Men's 
Christian Associations, which in many of our 
large cities are doing such a noble work, ex- 



A DEDICATION SERMON 341 

elude us expressly from all active participation 
in their affairs. Union prayer-meetings ignore 
our existence as having any possible access to 
the God of heaven. No Unitarian church mem- 
ber is asked as such to come to the communion 
table of those who are called evangelical. And, 
if a person united with their branch of the 
church wishes to leave it for ours, it matters not 
Jiow perfect his character, or how conscien- 
tiously he may have changed his views, instead 
of being furnished with a letter of recommen- 
dation, he is excommunicated and turned out 
into the world precisely the same as though he 
were a sinner guilty of some terrible crime. 

Far be it from me to refer to these things in 
the spirit of bitterness and reproach, or to for- 
get the nobler traits of these same churches, 
and the many pleasant things that from time to 
time they have said and done to ours. It was 
in one of them that I was born and bred, in its 
Sunday-school that I learned my first lessons 
of divine truth ; in its communion that are now 
some of the dearest friends I have on earth ; and 
I would as soon think of hating the spots and 
blemishes of my childhood's home as of bearing 
ill-will against any part of the body with which 
I have had such associations, and which as a 
whole, stands for such glorious truths. A 
large part of the exclusion we receive is doubt- 
less the inheritance of another age, a custom it 



342 SERMONS 

has become hard to break through, even though 
the feeling on which it was grounded has 
passed away. The members of these same 
churches take us by the hand in every secular 
relation with all the warmth and cordiality of 
brother men. The great liberalizing influences 
of our land and age, the warmth of that reli- 
gious tropical clime towards which the world 
evermore is moving, is having its influence 
greater or less on all sects. And, no doubt, if 
the question were put to the American people 
themselves to-day, to be decided simply on its 
own merits, the large majority of them would 
welcome us heart and soul to their communion. 
The fact, however, remains that for some 
reason, either ignorance, or prejudice, or tradi- 
tion, we are yet outside the pale of Christian 
sympathy. It is not a thing to cry over, not 
without its dignity and glory; is what the ad- 
vance guard of Christendom, through all ages 
from Christ down, has had to experience. And 
yet it is not a pleasant position — not one we 
desire of itself to hold. We say frankly we 
should be glad to have the fellowship of all 
churches ; glad to stand heart to heart, if not 
side to side, with all the vast army of the Lord, 
provided, always, we could do it without being 
false to freedom and self-respect, and false to 
our own special work. And on this occasion, 
when we are dedicating a Unitarian church, 1 



A DEDICATION SERMON MS 

hope it will not be out of place for me to try 
to set forth, not in the spirit of opposition to 
others, but of simple justice to ourselves, the 
claims, yea, the right, of Unitarians to the name 
and fellowship of Christians. 

We claim it, first of all, on the simple ground 
of being the friends and followers of Christ. 
A small part of our number may hesitate about 
using some of the terms which have been applied 
to him in a way which has given them a false 
significance; and we may not any of us speak 
about him with the exalted awe and reverence 
of those who believe he is very God; but in the 
plain matter of love and discipleship and de- 
pendence upon and effort to follow him, we do 
not yield to any body of men that bear his 
name. He is our Saviour, Exemplar, Master, 
the head and fountain of our religious faith, 
the vine of which we are the branches, the door 
by which we go in and out of the Eternal fold. 
Our hearts reach out to him through the long 
vista of the ages. We read with ever increas- 
ing wonder the story of his life. The melody 
of his celestial voice, the light of liis unshadowed 
eye thrill down to the very depth of our souls. 
We hear his call, as he stood by the sea of Gali- 
lee ; catch the glistening of his robes, as he 
stood on the Mount of Transfiguration; listen 
to those words of wondrous meaning, as he sat 
by the well of Samaria; go with him heavy- 



344 SERMONS 

hearted and bearing- the world's burden, as he 
went up the hill of Calvary; stand with all 
Christendom, thrilled with a new, unspeakable 
hope, by the side of his open grave. And we 
follow him, not only over the page of Scripture, 
not only amid the hills of Judea, but down 
through all the centuries, down to where he is 
standing this very day, in the vanguard of 
every great and true reform. 

What though we may not have the same 
opinion of his nature as the larger part of 
those who claim to be his friends, may not be 
able to distinguish within him exactly how 
much was human and how much divine? This 
does not vitiate in the least degree the reality 
or the strength of the tie by which we are his 
and he is ours. What is it that binds us to 
any beings that we love? Is it a knowledge of 
their metaphysical nature? Is it because we 
have measured the length and breadth of their 
minds and the number of their faculties and 
the greatness of their origin? No; the very 
idea of such a thing is absurd. It is the knowl- 
edge of their character, their deeds, their life; 
it is the greatness, not of their wisdom, their 
power, their origin, but of their hearts. And 
it is they who have the least power of meta- 
physical discernment; they who have never 
fathomed one faculty of the human soul, that 
are often the ones who love the most. It is so 



A DEDICATION SERMON 345 

in our attachment to Christ. It is the living, 
breathing, loving man ; not his theological an- 
atomy, to which our souls go out. There is no 
lengthening his life into eternity; no expand- 
ing his features on the scale of infinity; no 
conception of his voice as coming from the 
abyss of Deity, which can make them seem to 
our hearts more divine and fair and melodious 
than they now are on the page of Scripture. 
He who does not love him as simply Jesus 
Christ will never be made to love him by writ- 
ing under his name the Eternal God. How 
was it with his first disciples? When Matthew 
heard his call at the publican's bench; when 
Mary Magdalene poured over his head the box 
of ointment; when the apostle John leaned 
upon his bosom at the last supper; when they 
all suffered him to wash their very feet, do you 
suppose they then knew him as the Lord of 
heaven and earth, the Almighty and Everlast- 
ing Father? There is no one believes it. Yet 
were they not his true disciples, his followers 
and friends then? And, if we take him now 
just exactly as he appeared to them — just ex- 
actly as he was when he said, " Come unto me 
all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will 
give you rest," — are we not equally worthy to 
bear his name? 

But even on the ground that we must, in- 
deed, have a true belief about what he was, be- 



S4S SERMONS 

fore we ckn call ourselves Christians, our claim 
is not by any means weak. We adopt, as Uni- 
tarians, the exact language of the Bible in re- 
gard to his person. " Thou art the Son of the 
living God ; Jesus Christ was the Son of God ; 
my Father is greater than I; why callest thou 
me good.? there is none good save one, that is 
God; of mine own self I can do nothing; of 
that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, 
not the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but 
the Father; there is one God and one mediator 
between God and man, the man Jesus Christ, 
who is the first-born of every creature, and the 
image of the invisible God." These are all the 
exact words of Scripture. Whatever else we 
may say and believe, there is at least no get- 
ting rid of these. They express exactly and 
literally our Unitarian belief. And are they 
not enough.? Are they not more worthy, a 
thousand times, of our lips, as Christians, than 
the man-made phrases of the creeds in which 
he is called the second person of the Trinity, 
and very God.? 

But, as if to free us from all doubt on this 
point, the Bible itself declares they are enough. 
The Epistle of John states explicitly, " whoso- 
ever confesseth that Jesus is the Son of God, 
God dwelleth in him and he in God." How is 
it possible to have anything more definite.? 



A DEDICATION SERMON 347 

The pen of inspiration writes that in order to 
have the indwelling of God's spirit, which cer- 
tainly is the highest gift of Christianity, it 
is necessary to confess — not that Jesus is 
God, but that he is the son of God — our very 
Unitarian doctrine about him. And, with such 
authority before us, we ask — ask especially 
of those who believe in the letter of Scripture 
— is there any church under heaven which, at 
least, on the mere score of opinion about him, 
has the right to deny us, in any degree, the 
privileges and communion of his discipleship ? 
Still further, we rest our claim on the fact 
that we accept, not only his own doctrine con- 
cerning himself, but concerning all the great 
points of religion ; in short, that we believe in 
Christianity. There is not a single thing which 
he has ever taught that, as a denomination, we 
do not fully and implicitly receive. All that is 
most distinctive and characteristic of our faith ; 
all that we hold the most dear and precious in 
our hearts and lives — the unity and Father- 
hood of God ; love to God, and love to man, as 
the sum and substance of all duty; free for- 
giveness of our sins, on the simple condition of 
their repentance and confession; the everlast- 
ing worth of all human souls ; the divineness of 
this present earth, and the glorious hope of im- 
mortality in the world to come, each and all 
we own as coming from him ; and what is more, 



548 SERMONS 

we adopt them, not as they are set forth in the 
creeds and confessions of earth; not as they 
come to us second-hand, from the councils and 
synods of fallible men, but in the beauty and 
sacredness of the Scripture words, and just as 
they fell all glowing from his own heaven- 
anointed lips. What more could be asked? 
If a man accepts all the doctrines of Calvin, 
do we hesitate to call him a Calvinist? If he 
says, I take all my theology from Swedenborg, 
is there any scruple about calling him a Swe- 
denborgian? Why, then, should the Unitari- 
ans, who take all the doctrines of Christ in his 
own exact words, be denied the full name of 
Christians? Yea, does not the fact that we 
receive them without any intervention of theo- 
logical skill give us, if anything, a superior 
claim to this title? Is it possible that any 
wisdom of men can put his truth in better form 
than that in which he has put it himself? 
Is not the fact that so many churches will 
not accept from their candidates the sim- 
ple statement that they believe the New Testa- 
ment, but insist on having them say they 
believe, also, in a man-made creed, whose 
words are entirely different from those of the 
Bible — an indication that, somehow, they 
feel that Christ is not enough? And the 
church which throws aside all human creeds, 
which says to every man who comes to it, 



A DEDICATION SERMON 349 

declaring with his lips and life, I believe the 
gospel of Jesus Christ as taught by himself, it 
is all we want, — is there not, at least, a pre- 
sumption that such a church is a little nearer 
his truth and his person, than the one which 
has to supplement his words with those of man's 
device ? What does he himself tell us ? " If 
ye continue in my word," — most significant 
phrase ; if ye continue, not in the words of Cal- 
vin, or Edwards, or Hopkins, or the Westmin- 
ster Confession, or the Thirty-nine Articles, 
but " if ye continue in my word," — in the 
truth as I have spoken it — " ye are my disci- 
ples, indeed." And, if he can look down now 
on earth and take cognizance of what is going 
on in his Church, what must be his surprise, 
what his sorrow, — a wound deep as any that 
was made on the cross, — to see that the one 
church of Christendom, which throws aside all 
other formularies from its confession, and bases 
itself simply on his own free gospel, should be 
the one that is especially refused his name? 

There is one other test, furnished by the Bi- 
ble — the most inward and severe of all — to 
which not only every denomination, but every 
soul must be brought at last, which it will not 
do ever to forget. Have we the spirit of 
Christ.'' Do we obey; do we live his truth.? 
Are we bringing forth his fruits .^^ Are we 
like him in character, in temper, in our treat- 



S50 SERMONS 

ment of others, in our daily walk and conver- 
sation? It is this which is the real criterion — 
the word of God sharper than a two-edged 
sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder 
of the soul and spirit, the joints and marrow. 
It is his own test. He himself says, " Ye shall 
know them by their fruits." " Not every one 
that saith unto me. Lord, Lord, shall enter 
into the kingdom of heaven, but he that do- 
eth the will of my Father which is in heaven." 
" Herein is my Father glorified that ye bear 
much fruit, so shall ye be my disciples." " Ye 
are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I com- 
mand." How plain and direct and crucial are 
these words. It matters not how great is a 
man's attachment to Christ, or how lofty he 
exalts his person, even though it be to the 
stature of Deity, or how implicitly he receives 
his truth, even though it be as the voice of 
God, if he is not Christ-like, if he does 
not do his will and bear his fruit, he is not in 
the innermost sense of all a Christian. And 
if he has this spirit, if he does live his life and 
his truth, then no matter whether he calls him 
God or man, master or brother; no matter 
whether he has never heard his name, he is in 
the divinest sense of all a Christian. 

It is worth while to notice, moreover, that it 
is no imputed righteousness, no trusting in the 
merits of Christ to make up for the lack of 



A DEDICATION SERMON 351 

our own, which can aid us in deserving the 
name, but what we ourselves have and are. 
The words read, " Ye shall know them by their 
fruits," '• that ye bear much fruit," " he that 
keepeth his commandments," as if on purpose to 
show there can be no substitution. The re- 
ligion of Christ in its very nature is intensely 
personal, something which goes to the very 
quick, something which takes hold as nothing 
else ever does of the spirit's life. To have it 
at all it must be not as a robe, a thing which 
can be put on and off, but as a part of the in- 
most self. 

Far be it from us to claim that we bear all 
the fruits of the Gospel, that we are Christians 
in the full length and breadth of this glorious 
word. We know our short-comings too well, 
know that humility is one of the chiefest of 
those fruits ; and the nearer we get to the per- 
fect standard of Christ, paradoxical as it may 
seem, the farther do we find ourselves away. 
But it is the thing at which we aim, the very 
fault of which we are accused when it is said, 
as it so often is, that we hope to be saved by 
mere good morality. Yes, we do hope to be 
saved by good morality, the good morality of 
which Christ spake when he said, " He that do- 
eth the will of my Father shall enter into the 
kingdom," the good morality which runs like a 
stream of silver through all the Sermon on the 



35a SERMONS 

Mount, the good morality of which he himself 
is evermore the great exemplar. And, though 
we come very short of his divine measure, very 
short even of our own ideal, yet when com- 
pared with those who are regarded and treated 
as Christians in other churches, do we so ut- 
terly fail as to be excluded altogether from the 
name? Look in the community around you. 
Do not Unitarians bear in any degree the 
fruits of the Gospel? Are they never honest 
and upright in their dealings? Do they never 
visit the fatherless and the widow, and keep 
themselves unspotted from the world? Is there 
no love to God and love to man among them? 
Are their purses and their hearts closed always 
to the cry of distress? And do they refuse ab- 
solutely to act on the great principles of the 
Gospel? If you were going to select a man to 
be the guardian of your children, or to take 
care of money for you, or to subscribe liberally 
for some public charity, or to put in any posi- 
tion where kindness of heart and unswerving 
honesty, and a high devotion to principle were 
needed, would you go only to those prayer 
meetings and communion tables from which 
all Unitarians are excluded in order to find 
him? 

But, if the Unitarian faith does produce 
men endowed with these virtues, if they bear at 
least as much as other disciples the fruits of 



A DEDICATION SERMON 353 

the spirit, why should they not have equally 
with them the name and fellowship of Chris- 
tians? Is it not a little queer, is it not apt to 
give the world's people occasion for sharp re- 
marks, that the worst men should be so often 
treated as the best Christians, that the pillars 
of God's temple should be the rotten ones in a 
house of business, that the names placed on a 
church register, and supposed to be written on 
the Book of Life, should not be worth a straw 
when placed on a note of hand? Would it not 
be a thousand times more for the interests of 
religion and the honor of Christ and God, if, 
instead of making the distinction which now 
exists, the best Christian was made always and 
everywhere to signify the best man? 

Our claim is based, however, not only on 
these tests furnished by the Bible, but, still 
further, on the great Protestant principle of 
the right of private judgment. It is well 
known that the Roman Catholic Church re- 
gards all denominations outside of her own 
body as heretical and unchristian. How do 
the rest of us maintain our position as against 
her? It can only be done on the broad ground 
that every church and every individual has the 
right to judge for itself and himself what is 
true and what is the best form of worship and 
ecclesiastical organization, responsible for 
their conclusions only to him, the great head 



354 SERMONS 

of all things, to whom we are responsible for 
all our work. It is this which is the very 
Magna Charta of our Protestant liberties. It 
is adopted, in theory at least, by aU of what 
are called the evangelical sects. And it is in 
the exercise of this right, and this alone, that 
they each and all have arrived at their present 
position, and in spite of their differences are 
able to claim and hold the name of Christian. 
And yet, what more have we Unitarians done 
than to plant ourselves and act, act to the full- 
est extent, on this same eternal right.? We 
have gone to the Bible, gone to nature, gone 
everywhere that we could find one stroke of 
God's handwriting, one syllable that could il- 
lustrate the meaning of Christ, and out of it 
all made a judgm,ent of what is the true faith 
and the true worship. Is there any doubt that 
we have tried hard and faithfully to get at 
the real facts.? Have we not had among us 
ripe scholars, men net only with strong minds 
and deep, critical insight, but of fervent piety 
and spotless lives, and that spirituality and 
pureness of heart to which alone are promised 
the sight of God.? Is there any special induce- 
ment why we should fall into error more than 
other men.? Is not the absolute truth as pre- 
cious to our hearts and lives, and as absolutely 
essential to our eternal welfare as to theirs.? 
Why, then, have we not the same right to be re- 



A DEDICATION SERMON 355 

garded and treated as Christians as all other 
Protestant sects? How is it that any one has 
a right to use the principle rather than any 
other? Is it to be expected that we, any more 
than they, will give up what we believe is true, 
for the sake of agreeing with somebody else? 
And for any Protestant sect, or any number 
of them, to judge us and say we are not Chris- 
tians, because we have not arrived at their con- 
clusions, and, worse than all, to persecute us 
with the petty ways of excommunion and bad 
names, is it not denying the very principle on 
which we all stand, opening a mouth that would 
swallow up them as well as us? Is it not using 
the skin and voice, if not the teeth and claws, 
of the old dead lion they have tried so hard to 

km? 

Finally, we claim our place in the Church 
because the Unitarian denomination is equally 
essential with all the others to make up the 
completeness of Christ's body. The fact that 
our views, our work, our church organization 
is widely different from those of other sects, is 
so far from putting us beyond the pale of 
Christian fellowship, as to be one of the very 
best reasons why we should come within it. We 
do not pretend to have in ourselves all the ele- 
ments of Christianity ; do not pretend that our 
worship as it now is, can satisfy all the wants 
of the human heart. Denominations are all 



356 SERMONS 

around us endowed with virtues and powers 
which are far in excess of ours. The Metho- 
dists have more of warmth and zeal ; the Roman 
Catholics a better church organization; the 
Orthodox, doctrines which better reach peculiar 
minds, and the Episcopalians a richer and com- 
pleter ritual. There are only a few things in 
which we can claim a preeminence, such, per- 
haps, as a severer and simpler faith, a clearer 
setting forth of our Saviour's humanity, the ap- 
plication of religion to the aifairs of every day 
life, a new emphasis on the worth of this pres- 
ent world, and the best weapons with which to 
meet the assaults of atheism and scientific 
doubt. But what of this.^^ Because we are all 
hands and no nerves, or, as is sometimes 
charged, all head and no heart, are we of no 
use at all.? Are we not, therefore, a part of 
the body.? Yea, because we are not heart and 
not nerves, because we are simply hands and 
head, are we not all the more needed to act in 
fellowship with the other parts.? The fact is, 
there is no one denomination which can embrace 
the whole of Christ, no one worship which can 
possibly satisfy all hearts, any more than there 
is any one organ that can become the whole liv- 
ing body. The figure of Paul, in the twelfth 
chapter of Corinthians, is true to its very let- 
ter, one of the broadest and richest truths in all 
his teachings. We are many members all of 



A DEDICATION SERMON 35T 

one body. The Methodist heart, the Episcopa- 
lian flesh, the Orthodox bones, the Roman Cath- 
olic stomach, cannot say one or all to the Uni- 
tarian hands, I have no need of you. God has 
given us each one his own special work. Even 
our little radical ganglions, which seem to be 
cut off from all the great centers, have their 
place which nothing else could fill. It is our 
very differences, not our likeness, which make 
our union of such absolute importance. The 
very fact that one can see and do and believe 
what the others never can, that is the strongest 
reason of our working together. So long as we 
have the one spirit thrilling from nerve to nerve, 
so long as we are faithful each to the use of 
his own talents and place, we are all a part of 
Christ, all " should have the same care one of 
another." 

Here, then, we rest our claims to the name 
and the fellowship of Christians. How is it 
possible for any denomination to have those 
which are stronger in themselves, or which are 
founded more entirely in reason and in Scrip- 
ture .? They are what we ourselves are ready 
to grant, in all their fullness, to others. We 
hold out our hands to the right and the left. 
We look abroad over the whole range of 
Christendom, and wherever we see an earnest 
and true soul, wherever a human being touched 
in any degree with that glorious light which 



358 SERMONS 

1800 years ago broke over the mountain tops 
of Judea, there we own a fellow Christian, there 
see a life which is one with ours through our 
eternal head. It is the only broad and true 
platform, the only one which all humanity can 
ever stand upon, yea, the only one which is 
large enough to hold the whole of Christ. The 
great souls of all sects even now are planting 
themselves upon it. We have to-day, in spite 
of our visible exclusion, an unseen fellowship 
wide as the broad world, nerves of sympathy 
and feeling thrust through the stout walls of 
creed, and going over and around the deep gulf 
of rite and form, which thrill with the touch of 
kindred hearts in every church and every land. 
And the glorious hour shall come at last when 
all barriers shall be broken down and covered 
up ; when each denomination, yea, an3 each soul, 
bearing still its own name and true to its own 
work and its own faith shall yet stand up to- 
gether one loving band of Christian brothers, 
one mighty army of the living God. 

My friends, it is in all the length and breadth 
of this glorious fellowship, is it not, that 
you now dedicate this house of worship.'^ You 
come into it as a band of Christian worshipers. 
You claim your place and work here as a part 
of the great body of Christ. It is to be, first 
of all, before the name of any sect or party, a 
Christian temple. And you mean, so far as 



A DEDICATION SERMON 369 

your words and hearts can make it so, that it 
shall stand in this community for all in our 
faith which is loving and liberal, wide-reaching 
and divine. Welcome within its doors the peo- 
ple of all parties and sects, of all forms and 
faiths. Welcome, in exchange, within its desk, 
the preachers of every church and creed, Ro- 
manist or radical, orthodox or liberal, male or 
female — all that will speak in the Saviour's 
spirit and pray to the Christian's God. Wel- 
come around its communion table and to its 
warm right hand of fellowship all that will 
come, even the poorest sinner and the vilest out- 
cast, in the remembrance of our common Lord, 
and with the hunger and thirst of his immortal 
truth. Better that its walls should echo some- 
times with error than with narrowness and 
bigotry; better its aisles be trod with a want 
of faith than a want of charity. He is no true 
Unitarian who has a heart too small for the 
whole of Christendom, even its darkest borders 
and its roughest peaks. And any honest and 
true man that God has been willing to anoint 
and send forth into his own great temple of the 
universe, it surely cannot be very offensive to 
him that we, as the children of God, should 
welcome, heart and soul, into ours. 

But while the church is dedicated in the 
largest Christian fellowship, we would not, by 
any means, set it apart the less pronouncedly 



360 SERMONS 

for the worship and proclamation of our own 
Unitarian faith. We dedicate it to the One 
True God, Our Father in Heaven, the being 
whose highest name is Love, the object of all 
worship, and the source and center of all life. 
May he make it to be in very truth part of his 
own abode, a vestibule of that mighty temple 
whose arches spring beyond the beams of 
heaven's remotest star. May the light of his 
glory shine in at its windows, the voice of his 
truth echo along its walls, the beauty of holi- 
ness be the chief among its decorations. And 
when from week to week the sweet voice of the 
Sabbath bell shall swing forth its silver speech 
on the morning and the evening air, calling in 
his children from far and wide across its thresh- 
old, may it be to meet him here, the Everlast- 
ing Spirit, in awe and love and adoration. 

Again, we dedicate it to Jesus Christ, to him 
who is revealed as our Lord and leader, our 
Saviour and Mediator, the head of the church, 
a son, but the Son of God. It is he who is 
the comer-stone upon which its unseen timbers 
are laid. It is his religion freed from all the 
traditions of men and in his own broad and 
liberal spirit that we would have proclaimed 
within its walls, proclaimed, it may be, with 
different tongues, but ever out of his love. 
And it is through his presence, subtler than all 
truth, that life which went out of his bleeding 



A DEDICATION SERMON 361 

heart on the cross to be the vital power of the 
broad world, that it is to be made a living 
church. 

Once more, we dedicate it to humanity, that 
humanity in which Christ lived and for which 
he died ; that humanity which, even in its low- 
est form, our faith teaches, is made now, as 
it was of old, in the image of God. Open its 
doors not only to all names and sects, but to all 
classes and all ranks of men and women; open 
its desk, too, open it wide and free, not only 
to all religious teachers, but to all human in- 
terests, all that are connected in any way with 
our broad religious life. It is the church, not 
less than the Sabbath, that is made for man. 
Temperance, education, civil equality, political 
morals, the rights of labor and race and sex, 
everything which bears on the spiritual well-be- 
ing of any of God's children, is to go up to 
God in its prayers and be argued and enforced 
in its preaching. And if there is ever again 
a gospel reform despised and rejected of men, 
any that like the anti-slavery cause thirty years 
ago, is shut out of town hall, and school-house 
and lecture room, it is that chief of all that is 
to be welcomed and given its utterance within 
these walls. 

And now, friends, it remains for you, day by 
day and year by year, to set the seal of your 
hearts and lives to these formal words of dedi- 



362 SERMONS 

cation. May you come always within its doors 
in the spirit of the largest Christianity, the 
spirit of love to God and faith in Christ and 
good-will to man. May the experience of a 
true religion within its walls, of sins forgiven, 
of faith strengthened, of sorrow consoled, of 
work inspired, of hopes brightened, invest it lit- 
tle by little with the memories and genius of a 
sacred place. May the buds of promise in your 
children bloom forth in its air to that fragrance 
and beauty which only the light and warmth of 
a true religion can give. May the ties which 
unite you as brothers and sisters, husbands and 
wives, be woven around in its prayers with the 
golden thread of celestial love. May you ripen 
with its truth into better men and women, into 
truer citizens, into kinder neighbors and 
friends, into greater fitness and strength for 
all the labors and trials of daily life. And 
when you go out of its doors for the last time, 
and look back upon it from the eternal world, 
may you be able, each one, to say. It has been 
to me indeed none other than the house of God 
and the gate of heaven. 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 

A FAREWELL SERMON, HARTFORD, 1888 

Not disobedient unto the heavenly vision. — Acts 
XX vi^ 19. 

Dear Friends: Meeting with you this 
morning for the last time in our relation as 
pastor and people, my thoughts go back ir- 
resistibly to the aspirations, enthusiasms and 
plans in the glow of which ten and a half years 
ago my work among you was entered upon. 
Not with any merely routine and perfunctory 
ministry in view, as you know, did I accept your 
invitation to take charge of the revived move- 
ment here, then in its fluid, unorganized con- 
dition, but under the inspiration of what to me 
was " a heavenly vision," as to the kind of work 
it was possible for its leader to do. It was a 
vision to which I had long wished an oppor- 
tunity somewhere to be obedient. And the 
spring air was not more full of glint, hope and 
the mystic impulse towards summer's larger, 
life, than my heart was that May morning when 
I stood before you for the first time as 
363 



S64 SERMONS 

preacher, and saw in your eyes, as the sunshine 
does in the grass and flowers, the light reflected 
back which had come to mine. It is what to 
me is still a " vision splendid ; " what with all 
its disappointments has never had the moment 
come when 

** At length the man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day;'* 

is what many another minister is sharing. . And 
standing now in the late October of our pas- 
toral year together, amid the few golden-rods 
and scattered star-flowers which seem the chief 
outcome of its toil, I want for this closing serv- 
ice, not despairingly or reproachfully, but with 
cheerfulness and good-will towards all, to set 
before you again, as the best review of my 
pastorate, the vision of a minister's and church's 
work, dawning upon me at the start, to which, 
through all these ten perplexing years, I have 
tried to be " not disobedient," and to express 
anew my faith in it even as a failure. 

Its first distinctive feature relates to the kind 
of church that was to be built up, not its out- 
ward edifice alone, but with this its inner 
foundation, material and organization. The 
churches of the past have all had reference to 
past needs, and been shaped in accordance with 
a vision set forth in Scripture, rather than de- 
scending now fresh out of heaven. But, grand 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL S65 

as they have been in themselves, and grand as 
their service has been for their time — a fact 
about them amid all their shortcomings that no 
Liberal will deny, — who even of their most de- 
voted adherents can say that either outwardly 
or inwardly they are exactly adapted to the 
fresh work of our day, or who reasonably ex- 
pect them so to be, any more than the weapons, 
the tools, and the governments of the past are 
for our present widely changed world? Taught 
by experience how hard it is to remold for 
new uses things which the traditions of ages 
have made sacred, and coming here to a fresh 
field and to material, as I supposed, that was 
plastic and unhampered, it seemed a splendid 
opportunity, without sacrificing the essential 
church idea, so precious an inheritance from the 
past, to break away from its old bonds, and to 
shape its rising form into harmony with great 
living needs — adapt it, as the scientific phrase 
is, to its environment. 

With this principle as a guide, the aim has 
been from the start to base it not on a creed, 
a set of opinions about religion but on religion 
itself, love to God and love to man; to condi- 
tion its membership even in this respect not on 
profession, a declaration of having attained re- 
ligion, but on discipleship — a desire for its at- 
tainment; to make it up not of the rich, the 
educated and the respectable alone, or of the 



366 SERMONS 

poor, the ignorant and despised merely, two 
things equally bad, but of all classes and con- 
ditions of people in their one relation of 
brotherhood as the children of God; to put no 
price on its privileges, so many dollars of money 
on so many square feet of opportunity, but to 
offer them, like the Gospel itself, to all who 
came, without money and without price; and to 
make its building not merely a house of worship 
to be opened once or twice on Sunday, but a di- 
vine workshop, to be opened every day of the 
week for every object that would make its mem- 
bers better, a class-room for study, and a larger 
home, where the stranger in the city, and the 
young man and woman, now with only a saloon 
or a cold lodging-room to live in, could find 
books and games and social warmth, and assist- 
ance in all the relations of life. 

As regards Unitarianism, the aim has been 
to build it up in it not as a saving dogma, but 
as a helping idea, and as meaning not only the 
unity of God, but with this, the unity of man, 
— all nations, all religions and all interests. 
The brotherhood of different churches has been 
a part of its ideal; the divinity of other reli- 
gions outside of Christianity an element of its 
Christianity; the sacredness of all honest em- 
ployments and of all honest thinking, one of its 
own most sacred thoughts. And while setting 
forth with all emphasis and clearness its own 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 367 

convictions, it has believed in remembering the 
beliefs of the unbelievers, and has taken as its 
motto, equally imperative in both its parts, 
" Free speech in the pulpit, free judgment in 
the pews." 

Especially has it had in view the broader Uni- 
tarianism of its being a church, not for the rich 
or poor, the high or low, the laboring man or 
the employer alone, but a common ground on 
which all the different classes of society, believ- 
ing in religion at all, could meet together as 
equals, and in its mighty heart-tie find an off- 
set to the influences which are at work every- 
where else to drive them apart. We all know 
how it is in the world at large. With the use 
of machinery and the formation of great cor- 
porations, employer and employed no longer 
come into those direct human relations with each 
other which once did so much to unite them — 
in many cases never look into each other's faces, 
or know each other's names. With the filling 
up of our large cities, the rich have gradually 
clustered into one set of streets and the poor 
into another, destroying all their old neighborly 
interest in each other's welfare. Labor and 
capital with their repeated struggles have come 
to look on each other as only inevitable an- 
tagonists. Fashionable society is drawing its 
dividing lines more and more rigidly every year 
between its favorite few and its unrecognized 



368 SERMONS 

many. Even religion itself has its costly 
churches for the rich and its humble mission 
chapels for the poor, its saints of one faith 
in one denominational fold, and its saints of an- 
other in a different one. And in all our great 
communities there are thousands of people even 
now as divided from each other as the dwellers 
on different continents, and as hostile to each 
other as foes on battle-fields. It is these class 
divisions and antagonisms, these sectionalisms, 
not between North and South, East and West, 
but between street and street, house and house, 
that are the danger and problem of our land to- 
day; these, if allowed to go on, which are sure 
in the future to blossom into flowers of blood 
and to ripen into fruits of revolution, as hor- 
rible as any that the world ever yet has seen. 
How are these divisions to be met? how the 
feelings between them to be overcome? The 
mere preaching of love as a duty, first to one 
and then to the other, will not do it; markets 
and workshops have no power to bring it about ; 
and railroads and telegraphs and ships of com- 
merce, so mighty to unite nations in a closer 
union, operate only to drive classes farther 
apart. What they need is to come oftener to- 
gether on mutual ground, to know each other 
in some other and higher relations than those of 
business, and to feel the impulse gleaming from 
eye to eye and throbbing from heart to heart 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 369 

of some common, overmastering interest. 
There is only one thing which has even a ten- 
dency in this direction, not a credal, but a heart 
reHgion; only one place where there is even a 
possibility of its being realized, not an exclu- 
sive, but a wide open church. And who will say 
that such a bringing of them together is not a 
worthy experiment for religion to try ? who that 
in every community there ought not to be at 
least one place where the representatives of all 
its classes and all its ranks can meet each other 
from time to time, remembering only that they 
are all alike high born in being the children of 
one Eternal Father, and all alike rich in having 
one common human nature? who say that the 
man who tries even in one case to realize such a 
vision of the church, no matter how opposite its 
results may at first be, is working on false lines 
of human need, or outside of the religion of him, 
who, though incidentally a divider, had for his 
foremost aim the making of his disciples all 
brethren ? 

Building up a religious society, however, to 
be helpful to its own members, no matter how 
broadly so, can of necessity be only one part of 
any true minister's ideal. Religion is altruis- 
tic all through, as imperatively so with relation 
to churches as in dealing with individuals. Its 
law is everywhere, " Whosoever will find his life 
shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life 



370 SERMONS 

for my sake shall find it ; " and the more it 
holds to breadth and liberality as golden doc- 
trines the more imperative its law becomes to 
send them forth outside of itself in golden 
deeds. It is a principle which all churches in 
all ages, to their honor be it said, have in some 
form recognized, all of them counting the whole 
world as indeed their field. But their aim, for 
the most part, has been not to save the world as 
such — with their doctrine of its being under 
the Divine curse a hopeless task — but to save 
as many as possible of its individual souls out 
of its darkness into the spirit world; and all 
their schemes of redemption, so wonderfully de- 
vised and so fervently preached, have had refer- 
ence only to individual sins and been such as 
only individuals could apply. Gradually, how- 
ever, in our time there has come to the church, 
some parts of it, a larger conception of what 
it is to save the world — the saving of the thing 
itself, its institutions, its governments, its 
homes, its businesses, its whole social structure, 
the saving of it now and here as the kingdom 
of God on earth. It does not despise or ig- 
nore the saving of individual souls ; but as the 
farmer who would have good fruit does not at- 
tempt to cure directly his knurly and worm- 
eaten apples, but goes to work on the tree 
which bore them, grafting, pruning, digging 
around and protecting that, till he makes it 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL S71 

bear naturally only good fruit, so the larger 
church idea goes to work on this great world 
tree, developing and nourishing all its parts so 
as to make it bear of itself, to begin with, only 
saved souls. Its religion is sociological rather 
than theological. It preaches not so much re- 
pentance as reform, not so much doctrine as 
duty, not so much rites as rights. A Baptist 
brother went to Robert Ingersoll and asked if 
he believed in immersion. " Yes," was the re- 
ply, " if taken with plenty of soap " — profane 
but after all expressing exactly the new reli- 
gion's plan of salvation, the mingling of the 
heavenly cleansing with a large degree of 
earthly purification. It would save bodies as 
well as souls; save them out of sickness as well 
as sin ; save them to good wages as well as to 
good works. Its prayer is. Thy kingdom come ; 
its doctrine of the incarnation, Christ in the 
naked, hungry, sick and imprisoned. And of 
the food and drink given even to the lowest 
leper, it says: 

" This crust is his body broken for thee. 
This water his blood that died on the tree; 
And his Holy Supper is kept indeed 
In whatever we share with another's need.'* 

It is such a conception of the church's work, 
as indeed a heavenly vision, that I have set be- 
fore you and tried myself to be obedient to. 



372 SERMONS 

Believing intensely in reform as the gospel word 
of to-day, I have not sought to make any one 
of its phases a hobby, not believed in having the 
church take the place of the Temperance So- 
ciety, the Woman's Suffrage Association, or the 
Labor Movement, but have tried rather to bring 
it into fellowship with them and with all or- 
ganizations for the suppression of evil, count- 
ing them all as the secular branches of the one 
true church, and to supplement their own forces 
with all the inspiration of religion's motive 
power. There is nothing in all the world to- 
day which, it seems to me, is so divine, so direct 
a continuance of the Scripture's Holy Ghost, 
as the reformatory spirit. It does indeed take 
a great many queer forms, drives some men to 
be cranks, and some crazy, and some into move- 
ments which violate every principle of sound 
philosophy and of practical common sense, — I 
acknowledge that as freely as anyone can. It is 
like the inventive genius of our country, filling 
its Patent Office at Washington side by side with 
models which have proved of enormous prac- 
tical value, with others of perpetual motion de- 
vices, self-acting steamboat propellers, and the 
like, that dynamite itself would not make go; 
is like the rain, which comes down from heaven, 
much of it falling on the parched field and mak- 
ing the drooping plant revive, but a vast amount 
also, into muddy gutters, on barren rocks, down 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL S73 

the necks of belated travelers, and on the waste 
of ocean. But as both invention and the rain, 
taken as wholes, are of priceless worth, the one 
giving us such grand instruments of human 
progress as the locomotive engine, the telegraph 
and the printing press, the other all the wealth 
of the harvest field, so the reformatory spirit 
of our age, amid all its cranky devices, flying 
machines in the realm of morals, Keeley motors 
for running nations, and showers of philan- 
thropy poured into social gutters, is neverthe- 
less to-day our human world's most precious 
hope. Its motive power is altruism, doing for 
others, in its truest form. Wealth, honor, 
power, selfish good of any kind, is the very last 
thing its subjects can hope to get from its pur- 
suit; poverty, persecution and ridicule, — 

"A weary work of tongue and pen, 

A long, harsh strife with strong-willed men/* 

their almost sure reward. Whittier's words of 
one are true of all: 

" Forego thy dreams of lettered ease, 
Put thou the scholar's promise by; 
The rights of man are more than these! 
He heard and answered, * Here am I ! * " 

And to attempt to have the Christian Church 
share in such a spirit, the very soul of all re- 
ligion, to admit its advocates on to its platform, 



374 SERMONS 

and to have a word of kindness in their trouble 
for even the wildest of its workers, is it un- 
worthily a part of being obedient to the 
heavenly vision of its work? 

But especially have I believed in that reform 
which underlies and includes all others, the re- 
form of society itself. With all its glory, all 
the contributions to it of the ages past, who 
will say that the social structure is yet perfect ; 
who claim it has reached its final form; who 
deny that in it are some enormous imperfec- 
tions? And, if it is indeed to be improved, if 
we can expect saved souls to grow on it only in 
proportion as it is itself saved, who does not 
see that the very first thing to be done with it 
is to study its laws, find out how it is put to- 
gether, and apply its remedies not empirically 
by administering haphazard pills of goodness, 
but scientifically, as the wise physician does to 
the human body. It is in this sense that I am 
a Socialist, a believer in making society better, 
and proud of the name. There is nothing in all 
this universe which is more worthy of study ; no 
shining star that is fuller of splendor ; nothing 
in the realm of nature that more fully illustrates 
the process of evolution ; hardly the soul itself 
that is more alive with God. Let any one read 
the first two chapters in part second of Spen- 
cer's great work on Sociology, and he will find 
that romance itself will hardly compare with it 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 375 

in fascination. It is the anatomy and physi- 
ology of humanity's vast body, the resultant 
thus far of all history, the foundations already 
laid, out of which the kingdom of God on earth 
is to come. To study its costly past is the 
surest safeguard against the madness of . at- 
tempting to break it up for reconstruction; to 
study its mighty possibilities the surest safe- 
guard against the equal madness of attempting 
to keep it where it is. And the church, the min- 
ister, the men who are going to live in it, go- 
ing to take part in its affairs, going to help 
bring out of it saved souls, — if there is any- 
thing they need to be, is it not Socialists.? 

Yet while sympathizing with this larger work 
of helping society as a whole, I have tried not 
to forget that the Christian ideal includes, also, 
the humbler one of helping the weak, poor, sick 
and wronged of its individual members, the men 
and women who are suffering to-day with its 
imperfections, and who cannot wait to share in 
its far-off completion. All churches, thank 
God, are giving them something of this help, 
have branched out into something a great deal 
wider for their good than merely their technical 
soul-saving, but, alas, how often is it confined 
even now to what are respectable and established 
philanthropies ; and how many are the wounded 
travelers, some with the worst wounds of all, 
that its priests and Levites are still passing by 



376 SERMONS 

on the other side, or as Samaritans never heal- 
ing with a drop of that oil and wine they need 
most of all, a little heart-help. A man charged 
with a desperate crime was being taken by the 
police through one of our large cities. The 
crowd was terribly excited against him, and fol- 
lowed his steps with loud threats of vengeance. 
He answered them back with like ferocity, — • 
seemed the last person for anything but hang- 
ing to draw the wickedness out of. Just then a 
little newsboy ran up to him with a copy of his 
morning paper, exclaiming cheerfully, " Here, 
boss, take this ; I'm sorry I can't do something 
more for a fellow everybody is against, but I 
am glad to do this." The man burst into tears. 
" They are the first words of kindness," said 
he, " I have had spoken to me in forty years ; 
and oh, if I could only have heard a few such 
before, I never should have come to this." 
Forty churches in that city, and a little despised 
newsboy the first person in forty years to speak 
to one of its unfortunates a word of kindness ! 
And how many such wretches there are in the 
world, not only with the crowd against them, 
but under the ban of philanthropy itself, for 
whom a little humanity would do what no 
harshness ever can. I have no maudlin sympa- 
thy with vice and crime, as such — have a great 
deal of doubt as to the value of any mercy 
human or divine that would remit a deserved 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 377 

punishment, and of any benevolence, ojfficial or 
private, which takes merely the form of a gift 
to the needy. But I do believe with all my 
heart in the value of sympathy with them as 
men and women ; do believe with all my con- 
science in the benevolence of righting their 
wrongs, giving them a fair chance in the world, 
and helping them to help themselves. When I 
entered the ministry, it was with a solemn vow 
that however much I might fail in the religion 
of piety towards God, about my capacity for 
which I always felt dubious, I never would lose 
a chance of being true to the religion of hu- 
manity, and of humanity especially in its more 
humble and neglected forms ; and it has been in 
obedience to such a purpose that I have put in, 
from time to time, an earnest plea — as some 
have thought, too earnest — for such wounded 
travelers along the road of life as the enslaved 
negro, the persecuted Mormon, the despised 
Salvationist, the panic-hung anarchist, and the 
toiling men and women at our own doors, some 
of them wounded themselves in their frantic ef- 
forts to heal the wounds of their fellow-men. 
Nearly a year has now passed since I preached 
a sermon with reference to one such group, so 
under the ban of all society that even philan- 
thropy itself went by them with averted face. 
I did it, not as a believer in anarchy, but as a 
believer in Christianity ; did it as the little news- 



S78 SERMONS 

boy gave his paper, not out of any liking for 
crime, but as an act of kindness to human 
beings everybody else was against ; did it be- 
cause I felt that in a panic to vindicate the 
name of law a wound was being made on the 
soul of law such as not all the dynamite in 
the world could inflict. You know the cyclone 
of criticism it brought upon us, pastor and 
people both, the one for giving and the other 
for upholding such outrageous obedience to the 
Sermon on the Mount. It has brought me, 
also, a multitude of letters from all over the 
land, some written in tears of gratitude from 
men whom society's threats had hitherto only 
provoked to worse threatenings back; some 
testifying from long acquaintance with the 
executed men to their real innocence and to 
their high personal worth ; and some from per- 
sons of high literary and social standing en- 
dorsing heartily the position of the sermon 
with regard to the utter injustice of their 
treatment, — all throwing a flood of direct 
light on what was spoken of at first only in the 
dimness of faith. And to-day, looking at the 
whole matter in this clearer light, I want to 
say, not out of persistency in a course once 
taken whether right or wrong, but from a calm 
review of all the principles involved and of all 
which being true to them has cost, that in those 
words of kindness so unwise from any earthly 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 379 

standpoint, and so fatal to any earthly success, 
I can but think that my ministry, often, alas, 
so far away, reached, if ever, the nearest to 
its own ideal, carried a ray of gospel light the 
most widely to hearts usually shut against it, 
and came, if at all, the nearest to his teachings^ 
who said : " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 
the least of these my brethren, ye have done it 
unto me," and who himself on the cross, and as 
almost his last utterance for earth, spoke a 
word of kindness to a fellow criminal. 

A third field my ministry has tried to cover 
is the practical use of scientific truth as an 
adjunct to the truths of religion. There is 
no other department of knowledge which in our 
day has had such wonderful development, no 
other which has given such a new and distinc- 
tive character to our nineteenth century civil- 
ization, no other which has had such tremendous 
bearings on every phase of thought as this of 
natural science, and, especially, of natural 
science as it is summed up and unified in the 
grand new teachings of evolution. 

It is of no use to say that such a subject 
has no place in a Christian pulpit, and no mes- 
sage for an audience of common people hunger- 
ing for the bread of life. It is the common 
people, as they did the gospel of old, who hear 
it gladly. There is no keeping it away from 
their minds; no darkening of church windows 



380 SERMONS 

that can shut it out; no bars even of Presby- 
terian creeds which can prevent its coming in. 
It is in the very air they breathe; it is like all 
great movements of thought, something to 
which not a few great minds alone, but our 
race has come, 

" Swayed by vaster ebbs and flows than can be 

known to you and me." 1j 

Believing in it most intensely as a part of 
God's revelation to-day, a vision not the less 
out of heaven because coming through the 
scriptures of rock and clod, and by the prophet 
tongues of brute and bird, I have not sought 
either on the one hand to put it in the place of 
the old revelation, or on the other to reconcile 
it with its mere formal letter, but have ac- 
cepted it first in all its wholeness as scientific 
truth, and then used it as such to lengthen, 
broaden and fill out the old faith, as Jesus did 
his new gospel teachings to fulfil the old Mosaic 
law, — have tried to show how it has made the 
natural more full of miracle than the super- 
natural ever was ; given in its long history of 
man's development a new conception of his 
worth and dignity; built on the great natural 
doctrine of the survival of the fittest, when the 
proper time came, the great religious doctrine 
of care for the unfittest ; opened a new world 
for aspiration to mount up into; established 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 381 

Christianity as a necessary stage in the unfold- 
ing of religious thought; and, most precious 
of all, brought Deity out of the far-awa}^ 
theological heavens where the Church had so 
long placed him to be this world's infinite, all 
pervading Presence, — 

" Sent the shadow of himself, the Boundless, through 

the human soul, 
Boundless inward in the atom. Boundless outward 

in the whole." 

It is a use of the new truth, which, even as 
regards the Church itself, has seemed to me far 
more likely to prove for its ultimate advantage 
than any strengthening of it to resist its in- 
fluence possibly could. Years ago when I 
was in Texas, a steamboat captain who had run 
his vessel on a trading trip two hundred miles 
up the Brazos River, had the water suddenly 
fall under it, as, in Texas, rivers are apt to do, 
and found himself caught fast on the flats. 
A great drought ensued and the vessel lay 
there for three years, the grass growing down 
to its keel, and the very alligators laughing at 
its fix. Then suddenly there came a terrible 
flood. The great deeps seemed to be broken 
up. Houses and barns built on the solid earth 
were washed away; other boats moored in the 
river swamped and sunk. What did this cap- 
tain do.? Crammed his boiler with oil and tar. 



382 SERMONS 

cut his moorings, and with tiller in hand 
dashed down the rushing stream, making its 
very violence his friend, and in three days was 
on the broad sea with fifty fathoms of water 
under his keel, laughing at alligators and 
drouths. The world's church-ship starting 
years ago on a trip for souls along the stream 
of the old religion, has had here in our modern 
civilization its waters gradually go from under 
it, and finds itself hemmed in with the shoals 
of doubt. There has been a drouth for ages 
on its banks, — no showers of miracle, no rains 
of the supernatural, none at least it would let 
flow into its stream ; and the ship in its fixed- 
ness has become to many an object of ridicule 
and scorn. Suddenly from up among the 
mountains there shoots down this great flood 
of scientific truth. Is it not equally wise for 
the church to do as the steamboat did, give 
itself, with steam and tiller, to the swelling 
floods, and let them bear it, as they will, to 
where, fearless of all drouths, it will have under 
its keel the fathoms of nature's infinite sea.? 
And is it not indeed a worthy ambition for even 
the humblest of its crew, to help in using thus, 
what is likely to prove at last, religion's di- 
vinest gift.'' 

And now, friends, turning from this ideal of 
a minister's and church's work, so full of grand 
possibilities, to what has been actually ac- 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 383 

complished by us for its realization, how 
meager and imperfect, outwardly at least, the 
result is, — our beautiful church edifice, a little 
consecrated band within it, and here and there 
in the community at large, some soul, perhaps, 
stirred to a nobler life, but so far as the build- 
ing of a large and prosperous society with a 
wide, visible influence on the world's affairs is 
concerned, what must honestly be acknowledged 
as almost nothing at all. How it might have 
been in the midst of more congenial surround- 
ings and with less opposition on the part of 
some in our own ranks it is not needful now to 
consider, not certainly in any spirit of reproach 
against them. I take on myself the full re- 
sponsibility for what has happened, both the 
holding up to you of the ideal promised land 
as an object to be started for out of the old 
Egypt, and the failing to bring you through 
the intervening wilderness to its shining shore. 
The fact is the vision has been too high for the 
viewer ; the Canaan too far off and too glorious 
for the seeker. And it is to this cause, to its 
imperfect Moses, rather than to any opposing 
Ogs, Sihons, Hittites, and Jebusites that the 
coming short of it must be ascribed. 

But meager as this outward result is, as 
compared with the ideal started for, I do not 
think we need look back on our efforts^ for it 
with one particle of regret or shame. To 



384 SERMONS 

have struggled for a noble thing is in itself a 
success. As Lowell says: 

*' Not failure but low aim is crime." 

If our movement is a dead thing, it is dead on 
the field of honor. Whatever of weakness or 
mistake or want of shrewdness and tact may 
have been put into it, not one word or act or 
method have I ever sought to help it with that 
will not bear the fullest light even of religion's 
day. Prouder am I to have failed, if failure 
it is, in striving after such a church than I could 
be to have succeeded in building up after any 
meaner pattern the finest palace that wealth 
and fashion ever crammed. 

*' 'Tis not for heights of victory won^ 
But those we tried to gain^ 
Will come our gracious Lord's well done^ 
And sweet effacing rain." 

Defeat is not inconsistent with noble service, 
or lessening numbers with larger work. Victor 
Hugo tells the story in his " Legends of the 
Ages," that in one of the most decisive battles 
of modern Europe, a detachment of a hundred 
men was stationed in an old cemetery with 
orders to load and fire in one certain direction 
as fast as possible till night should come, and 
to hold the place at any cost. No position 
could apparently be humbler or less inspiring. 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 385 

They could see no foe, all around them being 
thickest mist and smoke, get no encouragement 
from the result of their firing, the whole field 
being hid in darkness ; and yet their place, 
though so humble, was swept repeatedly by 
the enemy's shot and shell, till every tomb had 
a dead body above it as well as one beneath its 
sod. Nevertheless obedient to orders and 
faithful to a soldier's grand ideal of duty, all 
day long out of ever thinning ranks they 
loaded and fired with what seemed to be an 
utter waste of ammunition, into what looked to 
be only the darkness. At last in the glimmer- 
ing twilight a general rode up. " Who holds 
this redoubt ? " An old sergeant limped for- 
ward. " Such and such a company of his 
majesty's regiment." " What ! " exclaimed the 
officer, looking round, " How many of you are 
left? " " Myself, sire, wounded, and one man." 
" Report to-night at my tent and receive your 
promotion and your medals of honor," said the 
general, uncovering his head ; " for know you, 
comrades, your unflinching fire all day long out 
of this old graveyard has raked the enemy's 
most cherished position, enabled our armies to 
win a glorious victory, and saved France ! " 
So in the great battles of right and wrong, 
truth and error, on the broad field of the re- 
ligious ages. It is the fidelity, pluck and per- 
severance of many a little band of men and 



386 SERMONS 

women stationed, as you have been, in positions 
outwardly as obscure and humble as that old 
graveyard, and firing, as you have done, their 
whole lives long with what seems to be only a 
waste of devotion and into what looks to be 
only empty space, they, possibly, who at the 
falling of the last dim twilight will be found to 
have done the most to win the Lord's day and 
to save his kingdom. 

"So failure wins; the consequence 
Of loss becomes its recompense; 
And every wish for better things 
And undreamed beauty nearer brings." 

Friends, it is in this faith and hope as to 
the final outcome of our church work, that I 
speak to you, one and all, my words of parting 
and farewell. If there have at times been op- 
position, misunderstanding and unfairness to- 
wards me from any, either here or in the com- 
munity at large, I have been too much taken 
up with the beauty and grandeur of our work 
to have them awaken in me against their givers 
one particle of personal resentment, — have 
looked upon them as only the necessary fric- 
tion that all undertakings a little ahead of 
their times have to encounter; and now in this 
closing hour, I wash even the remembrance of 
them from my mind, as at the close of day we 



A MINISTER'S IDEAL 387 

all do the stains of toil from our hands. And 
you who have shared with me this grand vision, 
worked with me so faithfully for its realiza- 
tion, and in many a dark night and hard strug- 
gle stood by me so unfaltering in its defense, 
how can I thank you warmly enough for your 
sympathy and support ! It is hard every way 
to break up the relation between us, glorified 
to some of you by its association with loved 
ones passed now from earth; hard most of all 
to give up the joy and thrill of our comradeship 
in struggling and suffering for a noble cause, 
the sweetest, in some respects, that life has to 
offer. But my interest and sympathy will be 
with you and with your work as warmly in the 
future as they have been in the past. Go on, 
keeping still in sight the star which has so 
long been our guide. May another and better 
leader soon be found to conduct you from the 
victory of failure to the sweeter, if not 
grander, victory of success. Be assured that 
the misunderstandings about us in the com- 
munity, often among those we have tried the 
hardest to befriend, will give place at last to 
a knowledge of how broad and humanitarian, 
how Christian, also, our aims have been. And 
when the day of numbers, strength and popular 
favor comes, as it surely will, and the church 
we have dreamed of becomes the church you 



388 SERMONS 

have realized, all I ask is that you will remem- 
ber kindly the one, nay, I ought rather to say 
the twain, who in your night of weakness were 
" not disobedient to its heavenly vision." 



/ 



VI 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE OF 
RELIGION 

A FAREWELL. SERMON, SHARON, 1904* 

He that loveth not his brother whom he hath 
seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ? 
And this commandment have we from him, that he 
who loveth God love his brother also. — I John iv, 
20, 21. 

Parishioners and Friends: Standing be- 
fore you to-day for the last time in our 
relation as pastor and people, it is nat- 
urally not an occasion in which to set forth 
any new line of thought or form of duty. I 
want, rather, to gather up the threads of what 
I have been saying these four years of our in- 
tercourse into a single knot of truth that I can 
leave with you as a deepened impression, — 
want to speak again the one distinctive word 
that God has spoken to me as the leading word 
of our time, by which I would have you remem- 
ber me when I have passed away beyond all 
speech. And that word is Man; that truth, 
the Humanitarian side of Religion. 
389 



390 SERMONS 

There is a sense in which all religion is hu- 
manitarian. It is all meant, even its most 
theistic parts, not for angels, not for saints, es- 
pecially, not for any select few recipients any- 
where, but for men, all men. It appeals to our 
human nature; to what is our human nature 
not the less, because some of it is to its spiritual 
side. And all its virtues, all the faculties it 
calls into action, love, reverence, awe, adora- 
tion, as well as righteousness, sympathy, be- 
nevolence, helpfulness, are human virtues and 
human faculties. 

There is a sense, also, in which all religion 
is theistic and spiritual. God is not a being 
who is widely separate from man and earth. 
All spirits are emanations of his spirit ; all laws 
his laws ; all goodness, doubly sweet in its hu- 
man embodiments, the manifestation of his 
goodness ; the finite love which bends over the 
cradle, a spark of the Infinite Love which bends 
over the universe. It is only by knowing man 
that we can know spirit and know God. 

*' No one could tell me where my soul might ber 
I searched for God^ but God eluded me: 
I sought my brother out and found all three.** 

Humanitarian work is a form, sometimes the 
best form, of heavenly worship, even as the 
Bible says : " Pure ritual " — for that is what 
the word translated " religion " here means — 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 391 

" pure ritual is to visit the fatherless and 
widows in their affliction and to keep one's self 
unspotted from the world." And everywhere, 
it is not the tools with which it is done, but the 
temper, that makes our toil divine; not Christ 
alone, but God in Christ, who says, " Inasmuch 
as ye have done it unto the least of the hungry 
and thirsty and sick and naked and imprisoned, 
ye have done it unto me." 

But while these two sides of religion thus 
overlap each other in their full development, 
like north and south, east and west, humani- 
tarianism is distinctively the side of it which 
begins with the relations, ethical and philan- 
thropic, that man has with man, aiming at their 
improvement, and which reaches through them 
up to God, leaving to Theism the relations, 
doctrinal and devotional, which man has with 
Deity and which reach through him down to 
earth. 

It is a religion whose starting-point is the 
relation man has with himself and with his own 
immediate family. A great deal of nonsense 
has been written about doing for self as neces- 
sarily the opposite of doing for humanity. 
Humanity is not a species of being separate 
from self, but is a species made up of selves, — 
its cult, at the start, not a religious quantity 
circumferenced by the race, but a religious 



393 SERMONS 

quality centered in the individual; not a Mrs. 
Jellyby working for a Borioboola Gha in Cen- 
tral Africa to the neglect of herself and her own 
home, but a Mrs. Jellyby that as a vital part of 
its field includes herself and her belongings. 
It is only the full fountain which can make 
the full stream; only by knowing what the in- 
dividual family is that there can be any mean- 
ing to the phrase, the family of man; only by 
a person's being strong and wise and good him- 
self that he can help others to be strong and 
wise and good ; and even to make for others a 
sacrifice of self that is of any value, there must 
first be a value of some kind stored up in the 
sacrificed self. 

But how is a man thus to build up himself 
and his family.? He cannot work on them di- 
rectly, as he does on a house or a piece of fur- 
niture; he can do it only by working on some- 
thing outside of himself and them. As all 
streams come from fountains, so all fountains 
in their turn come from streams. The body is 
made strong by acting on other bodies. To 
earn a living for himself and his own family a 
man must do something toward a living for 
other men and other families; to have humani- 
tarianism within as a quality, must have a hu- 
manitarianism without that takes in the race. 
Reciprocity is the statesmanship of the soul, 
as it should be of the nation. 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 393 

" There's not a blessing individuals find 

But somehow leans and hearkens to mankind ** ; 

not a blessing that leans and hearkens to man- 
kind that does not somehow the individual find, 
so beautifully do these two apparently contra- 
dictory parts of a humanitarian religion play 
into each other's hands. 

Beyond self and family it is a religion which 
next reaches out into what is literally the 
neighborhood. Full of practical wisdom is the 
Old Testament injunction, Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself. Humanity, in its mean- 
ing of the race, is too large a thing for the 
mind at once to take in ; love to man as a spe- 
cies what no heart, to begin with, is able to feel. 
But our neighbor, — he is a being we can see 
and know, he a part of humanity we are brought 
face to face with every day, he the one that 
without any contribution-box or missionary so- 
ciety we can help. And whatever he is in him- 
self, Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant, 
black or white, rich or poor, educated or igno- 
rant, and, in its last stretch, saint or sinner, 
our religion on its humanitarian side should 
bring us into some sort of kindly relations with 
him, — a courteous greeting in the street, an 
exchange of visits now and then in the home, 
an avoidance, so far as possible, of all annoy- 
ance to him in the way of disagreeable sights 



394 SERMONS 

and sounds, and an acting to him the part of a 
Good Samaritan when he falls among the 
thieves of sickness, misfortune, and want. 
The neighborhood is the Sunday-school room 
of humanitarian religion, the distance between 
its houses the base line of the triangulation in 
the survey which is to take in the race; being 
neighborly the opening chapter in the great 
book of being humane. 

It is a religion which finds for itself a large 
field in the business world. It is not ashamed 
to put on the merchant's coat, the mechanic's 
blouse, the farmer's hat, the sailor's jacket; 
and it considers it no desecration to make the 
daybook and ledger a part of its sacred Scrip- 
tures. It does not quite include, not at least 
to my conception of it, what is ordinarily ex- 
pounded as Socialism. To be sure, it believes 
in union, in partnership, in co-operation; but 
it believes, also, in individualism, in competi- 
tion, and to some extent in antagonism, — finds 
these forces all at work in the human body, in 
the starry skies, everywhere in nature as the 
agents by which evolution is carried on and 
progress brought about; and it sees no reason 
why they should not be recognized as equally 
helpful in the business world. 

But it does not believe, any more than So- 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 395 

cialism does, in any cut-throat competitions, or 
in any antagonisms that would destroy or maim 
or even weaken those engaged in them, whose 
efforts, however opposite, are honorably and 
honestly made. Its fundamental principle is 
that all business is itself normally a form of 
beneficence, a far better form of it than 
charity ever is, a form in which wages, salaries, 
prices, payments are but counters in the great 
world-game of mutual service. The articles in 
which it deals — significant name — are all 
goods, excluding, therefore, all shams, all 
speculations, all trades like liquor-selling which 
harm humanity. Its competitions are to see 
which party to them will do its best ; its an- 
tagonisms, like the opposing muscles of the 
human body, those which help men forward, or 
of the jaws, which better bite off their food; 
its good bargains, bargains which are equally 
good for both sides ; and commerce and the 
com.mercial spirit, in spite of their enormous 
evils, it believes in as the best missionaries 
God has on this earth to-day. 

It has nothing to say against wealth, even 
excessive wealth, when it is honestly earned. 
If a man does society a million dollars' worth 
of service, it sees no reason why he should not 
have a million dollars' worth of reward. But 
if other men, laboring-men especially, have 



S96 SERMONS 

been partners with him in the service, then it 
holds that labor ought first of all to be a sharer 
with him in the returns. 

But labor as well as capital has its humani- 
tarian duties, — has no more right to be cut- 
throat or tyrannical or over-selfish than its 
antagonist has. The man who exacts four 
dollars a day for two dollars' worth of work is 
just as dishonest in principle as the one who 
takes four millions where only half of them are 
his due. Watered toil is as bad morally as 
watered stock. The Golden Rule is none too 
golden to be kept amid the dust and dirt of the 
factory. A form of faith as saintly in the 
kitchen as in the kirk is faithful service ; and 
whatever question there may be about the the- 
ological value of good works, there is none any- 
where about the humanitarian value of good 
work. 

Passing on from the business world to what 
is known more distinctively as the social world, 
what does humanitarianism demand with re- 
gard to the different classes, sects, and races 
into which it is divided, and with regard to 
their relations with each other, often full of 
inequalities and bitterness? Not, certainly, 
any revolutionary action ; not, on the one hand, 
that they should be utterly abolished and so- 
ciety reduced all to one dead level, or, on the 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 397 

other, that there should be established any 
forced and arbitrary equality of their rights 
and intercourse. The social structure, with 
all its enormous evils, is, as Herbert Spencer 
has so admirably shown, one of the most beau- 
tiful and blessed of all the institutions human- 
ity knows, its diversities of class, sect, and race 
a part of that wonderful variety with which 
nature everywhere, from flowery field to starry 
sky, from elemental atoms to starry souls, is so 
graciously filled, a variety which adds not only 
to the world's esthetic charm, but is, also, ab- 
solutely essential for the doing of its varied 
work. 

" Order is Heaven's first law^ and, this confessed. 
Some are and must be greater than the rest." 

And to wipe out these diversities, make all 
classes, all races, all religions, one class, one 
race, one religion, even the best, would be as 
bad socially as it would be physically — using 
Paul's figure — to have the body all eye, all 
ear, or even all brain. 

No; what is needed is not revolution but re- 
form, not the unity of sameness but the unity 
of spirit, not equality of rank but equality of 
opportunity, not that the members shall have 
their treatment determined by the outward 
badge of their class or race or religion, but 
that they shall have it correspond with what 



398 SERMONS 

they are in themselves individually as human 
beings. Whether or not a man is " a white 
man " is to be answered not by whether or not 
he has a white skin, but by whether or not he 
has a white soul. It is here that the South 
makes its great mistake in the treatment of its 
colored citizens. To vary Pope's famous line 
a little, 

" Honor and shame from no complexion rise." 

If Booker Washington is inwardly good presi- 
dential company, there is no reason why 
Booker Washington should not sit outwardly 
at a presidential table. When Fred Douglass, 
one afternoon before the war, was walking 
down Broadway in New York, and everybody 
was shunning him, an officious individual, with 
a patronizing air, stepped up to him, exclaim- 
ing, " Here, Douglass, I am not ashamed to 
be seen walking with a nigger ; come with me." 
" Indeed ! " replied Douglass, drawing himself 
off, " and who may you be that a nigger 
shouldn't be ashamed to be seen walking with 
you? " There is no race, no religion, no class, 
that has a monopoly of personal worth. There 
are multitudes of black men that are more 
manly, more cultivated, more fitted for the best 
society, than multitudes of white men; multi- 
tudes of heathen who are more saintly, more 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 399 

humane, more fit for heaven than multitudes of 
Christians. 

" What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards ? 
Alas ! not all the blood of all the Howards." 

And such being the case, why should not each 
one be treated according to what he is, rather 
than according to what he is labeled, — the 
Guinea man ranked by his guinea worth, rather 
than by his Guinea stamp? 

But this is not all. Humanitarianism has 
something to say about the treatment of the 
worst members, as well as the best ones, of its 
social classes, — about the sinful, the sick, the 
poor, the ignorant, the wronged, and the weak 
of our race, — believes in associating with them 
even more than with the best as a healer, helper, 
sympathizer, and friend, — would lift them up 
not by any outward arbitrary raising to a 
higher level, but by making them inwardly ca- 
pable and fit to rise of themselves to any 
height. It beholds in every human being, be- 
neath all the guises of ignorance, poverty, and 
sin, the splendor and the worth of an immortal 
soul. It finds its Christ located not on the 
throne of God, not amid the hills of Galilee 
alone, but in all the hungry and thirsty and 
naked and sick and imprisoned of earth. 

Better still, it seeks to save men not only out 



400 SERMONS 

of sin and sickness and ignorance and wrong, 
but to save them from ever getting into them 
at first. While it carries at the bottom of its 
medicine-chest the pounds of cure, it carries 
at the top of it the ounces of prevention. It 
does not wait till the traveler has been assailed 
and left half dead, before going to his assist- 
ance, but wherever possible it thrashes the 
thieves before they have a chance to make the 
assault, — does not wait, if it can help it, till 
men are made drunkards before trying to make 
them sober, but would shut up the saloon first 
that tempts them to drink; and, better even 
than this, it aims in its highest ideal to have 
the road down to Jericho, and all the roads in 
Jericho, and all the roads of earth everywhere, 
so civilized and safe, and all the travelers on 
them so inwardly armed, that they can be trod 
without even the thought of thieves. 

Turning now from the social world and its 
divisions to the political world and its different 
parts, who shall say that the same great hu- 
manitarian principles that apply to individuals 
and occupations and classes and races do not 
logically apply to kingdoms and nations and 
states and governments.? 

As regards patriotism, the narrower special 
love the citizen has for his country, love to 
man does not interfere with it, does not involve 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 401 

the wiping out of political divisions, any more 
than it does with individual welfare and social 
distinctions. His country is a person's larger 
self, — is not a separate entity from humanity, 
but one of its members ; and to love it and la- 
bor to build it up, the same as with his lesser 
self, is the necessary condition of enabling it 
to do its part for other countries and for the 
world at large. 

How is it to be built up, — how the citizen 
show it his love? Of course in the case of a 
country a good deal of the work is to be done 
directly on itself. Its material interests are 
to be labored for, its institutions developed, its 
politics kept pure, its government supported, 
its liberties maintained, its conduct, when right, 
applauded, its conduct, when wrong, just as 
surely condemned, and, crowning all else, that 
without which wealth and institutions and 
government and liberties are all in vain, the 
manhood and womanhood of its citizens, the 
things which constitute them a worthy part of 
humanity, are to be unfolded. 

But this alone is not enough. No nation 
ever reached its highest well-being by acting 
wholly on itself. Altruism is needed here for 
precisely the same reason, and it works on pre- 
cisely the same principle, as in individual self- 
culture. It has to benefit other nations to get 
the highest benefit for itself — has to trade 



40^ SERMONS 

with them in goods, exchange with them ideas, 
share their discoveries in science, visit in their 
homes, get the stimulus which comes from com- 
petition with them in arts and manufactures, — 
have now and then a great World's Fair in 
which each shall show its best. And for this 
reason all tariffs, all custom-houses, all bar- 
riers of every kind to the freest intercourse are 
at once unpatriotic and unhumanitarian. No 
one nation can build up its own prosperity by 
tearing that of others down. To have profit- 
able trade there must be money and goods and 
profit on both sides. And to have the great 
body of humanity all healthy, there must be, 
the same as with the physical body, the circu- 
lation of its life-blood without restriction to 
all its parts. 

War waged in self-defense humanitarian- 
ism cannot, I suppose, wholly condemn. To be 
sure, all war, even defensive war, is hell. But 
there are different depths of hellishness even in 
hells ; and tyranny, the loss of self-govern- 
ment, and the sight of homes ravaged and loved 
ones slain, — these are depths to it deeper than 
even the horrors of the battle-field. 

** The sheathed blade may rust with darkest sin." 

But humanitarianism does say that even de- 
fensive wars should be entered upon only when 
every possible expedient for peace has been ex- 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 403 

hausted ; and all other wars, and all things that 
lead up to other wars, no matter under what 
pretense they are waged of extending over a 
people civilization, religion, good government, 
or even of opening a highway for the world's 
commerce, — all such wars it denounces as at 
once criminal aggressions and political 
blunders. Liberty, liberty to be themselves, 
liberty to work out their own destiny in their 
own way, is its watchword for all people and 
all lands. And arbitration, the gathering of 
all nations, the weak as well as strong, into the 
one great Parliament of Man, there to settle 
their differences and find their agreements, — 

** All the full-brain, half-brain races led by armis- 
tice^ love^ and truth/' — 

that is its crowning aim. 

What is the basis of this humanitarian re- 
ligion, what the root out of which all these 
duties and relations of human beings to each 
other finally grow? 

It does indeed have the authority of Scrip- 
ture. Jesus himself makes it explicitly one- 
half of all religion, illustrates alike its breadth 
and its depth with his parable of the Good 
Samaritan; and in the opening words of his 
prayer, left his followers of all races to use, 
" Our Father " ; he has compelled them in the 
very act of recognizing the exalted filial rela- 
tion they have with Deity to recognize the di- 



404 SERMONS 

rect fraternal relation, " Our," that they have 
with each other. 

But its real basis is deeper down than this. 
Christianity below all its splendid heights is 
most emphatically a natural religion, — does 
not rest merely on any written word, or bring 
its duties from any other world, or utter its 
sayings because as great sentiments they look 
and sound well. It builds always on our hu- 
man nature, finds its Golden Rule by scraping 
away the dust from what was already in the 
soul, is a religion in the word's literal meaning 
of binding its recipients back to the great 
primal truths from which they had broken 
away; and the truth here on which its humani- 
tarianism rests in the natural inborn unity and 
solidarity of our race, the fact that amid all 
their diversities and separations its parts are 
only the members of one larger human body, — 
mankind simply man written large. 

It is a basis which is implied in the very 
wording of the Christian command, " Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," a phrase 
legitimately meaning not merely as much as 
thyself, or in the same way as thyself, but as 
being a part of thyself. Man's separations 
are only on the outside. There are veins and 
arteries ramifying from land to land which 
pulse back and forth with a subtler blood than 
that of our individual flesh ; muscles and nerves 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 405 

reaching over mountains and dipping under 
seas, which bind nations together as limb to 
limb even when their armies are glaring at each 
other in the red light of battle-fields ; nerves 
such as no anatomist has ever laid bare, along 
which peoples commune whose spoken woi:ds are 
to one another only as empty sounds. 

The darker results of this oneness nature 
itself is continually reminding men of. The 
pestilence which springs up amid the filth and 
ignorance of some unknown village in far-off 
Asia has a part of its victims the next season 
in the heart of New York or Boston. The 
business depression which ever and anon breaks 
out in England or America makes its unticketed 
journey, independent of all railroads and 
steamships, and alike through the barred doors 
of tariffs and the open gates of free trade, com- 
pletely around the globe. And sending our 
armies off ten thousand miles across the sea to 
torture Filipino patriots, and strike down 
Filipino liberties, the wave of violence started 
there recoils through seas of soul to fill our own 
land with murders and weaken the words that 
for a hundred years have declared our own 
freedom. 

" For mankind are one in spirit^ and an instinct 

bears along, 
Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of 

right or wrong " ; 



406 SERMONS 

or, as the apostle Paul puts it, " Whether one 
member suffer, all the members suffer with it, 
or one member be honored, all the members re- 
joice with it." 

The base of the humanitarian side of reli- 
gion is simply the brighter and more developed 
side of this deep down, natural oneness. It 
takes what is often such a terrible thing in na- 
ture, our being linked for health or disease, joy 
or sorrow, liberty or tyranny with all, even the 
worst, of our race, and uses it as the founda- 
tion on which to build its temple of universal 
helpfulness and love. Are we bound up, it 
says, in one fate with our miserable neighbor? 
Then, instead of viewing him with hate and hor- 
ror as tending to drag us down and make our 
fate one with his, let us, rather, view him with 
sympathy and assistance, so as to lift him up 
and make his fate one with ours. Confronted 
in nature with the alternative. Save or suffer 
— obey the " shalt " of love and live, or th^ 
" shalt " of law and die, it cordially chooses to 
save and live. With a divine alchemy it trans- 
mutes the base metal of fear as a motive power 
into the precious one of affection. And just 
as the man who loves his lesser self, if he has a 
sick stomach, or weak lung, or wounded arm, 
or even the humblest and most insignificant 
organ of his body diseased or suffering, will 
give it his special attention and aim to bring it 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 4^T 

back to health, so man's love for his larger self, 
carried out, will lead him to give a like special 
care to all the like humblest and most insignifi- 
cant parts of his larger race-self. 

With its scope and basis thus defined, what 
is the duty of the Church with regard to this 
side of religion? Can there be any question 
that it ought to proclaim it as, at least, one- 
half of God's truth, and proclaim it not as an 
abstract principle merely, but in its direct ap- 
plication to the state of things in our own 
time ? 

Much indeed has been done in the past for 
its realization. Originally there was no rec- 
ognition of it at all as any concern of religion. 
Enmity rather than love, killing and not sav- 
ing, were for ages the supposed duty of man 
to all outside men; for ages even under Chris- 
tianity the supposed duty of the churchman to 
all outside churches. It was a great day for 
religion when the word " humanity " came into 
its vocabulary, as great as it was for science 
when it got the word universe as a part of its 
speech. And since then, beyond question, won- 
derful has been the progress it has made both 
in the preaching of the Church and the practice 
of the world. 

But, alas, with all that has been accom- 
plished, how far is it from having reached 



4*08 SERMONS 

either in breadth or depth the realization of its 
ideal! Look at the shortcomings of the indi- 
vidual man, at the wretchedness there often is 
in families, at the conflicts of labor and capital 
in the business world, at the ravages of intem- 
perance in all classes of society, at the robbery 
and murder that are going on in our houses and 
streets, at the broad lines of separation that 
exist between the rich and the poor, at the self- 
seeking and wire-pulling and money-grafting 
of our politics, at the huge armies and navies 
that in the midst of our civilization are being 
prepared for war, at the strong races and na- 
tions that are trampling down the rights of 
the weak, at England holding even now in its 
homicidal arms the dead bodies of two strangled 
infant republics, at our own country, its hands 
yet red with the blood and torture of Filipino 
patriots ; and without any pessimistic despair, 
but only recognizing things as they are, who 
shall say that " man's inhumanity to man " is 
all a thing of the past, and that the Church has 
not still a most imperative call to preach the 
humanitarian side of religion? 

What though some of the issues before it are 
those of politics? Are politics to be set aside 
as a department of action that has nothing to 
do with morals, and under whose mantle cor- 
ruption and crime are to hide safe from reli- 
gion's condemning voice? When it is a nation 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 409 

that is our neighbor, is the law of loving it as 
ourselves never to be spoken? When a politi- 
cal David has seized a poor State's one ewe 
lamb, is no church Nathan to go to him and 
say, " Thou art the man " ? And when the 
traveler going down to Jericho is a whole peo- 
ple that thieves and robbers have wounded and 
left half dead, is no pulpit to cross over to him 
as a Good Samaritan with its' healing oil and 
wine, no preacher to remonstrate with his 
countrymen beforehand against being the 
thieves and robbers who do the deed? 

Of course, about all such new issues there will 
inevitably be a difference of opinion. Not 
everybody even of the Lord's army can march 
in the front ranks ; and there may well be those 
who, before a step is taken, want to make sure 
it is one in advance. But, surely, in all issues 
where morals and religion are involved, the 
preacher, if fit for his place, leaving to others 
their secular side, ought always to lead off in 
at least presenting their higher claims, ought 
always, ahead of the practical, to keep waving 
the standard of the ideal. 

This does not mean that even in moral issues 
the preacher is necessarily always right. He is 
liable, like all other men, to make mistakes, — 
leads off in many directions' which prove to be 
aside from, and sometimes contrary to, the line 
in which God would lead. But this is true of 



410 SERMONS 

all progress, is God's way of having men find 
out which is the right course. You have heard 
the story of the Arab captain with his troop of 
a hundred horsemen trying to cross at night an 
arm of the Red Sea, and losing the ridge shal- 
low enough to take them over; how, after 
floundering about for a while, he gathered them 
all about him and started them off like the 
spokes of a wheel, in a hundred different direc- 
tions, with orders for the one to shout who 
found the passable way. Ninety-nine of them 
got into deep water and failed, but one raised 
the required shout, and, following him, they all 
crossed in safety. That is what the great Cap- 
tain of our salvation does with his men in find- 
ing the path of right for the world to take. 
He has them start off in different directions, 
some necessarily the wrong ones, and they fail. 
But among them some at least are sure to dis- 
cover where real right lies, and, following it, 
humanity passes through seas of danger safely, 
from shore to shore. Who will say this is not 
better than standing still, or floundering aim- 
lessly about? Who will say that the ninety- 
and-nine who fail do not contribute as much to 
finding the true course as the one who succeeds.? 
It is a duty, however, which belongs not to 
the preacher alone, but to the whole church. 
How otherwise than by carrying on its work a 
little further in the present can humanity make 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 411 

any return for the mighty work it has had done 
for it in the past? What is to be said of the 
man, inheriting the faith that has been gained 
for him by the toil and sacrifice of all the ages, 
— standing where he has to say 

" By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding 

feet I track. 
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that 

turns not back, — 

who leaves the church as soon as the pulpit at- 
tempts to add 

" One new word to that grand Credo which in 

prophet-hearts hath burned 
Since the first man stood God-conquered with his 

face to heaven upturned " ; — 

what of the woman, breathing the humani- 
tarian air which has been made sweet for her 
by the martyr-fires of uncounted Perpetuas 
and Blandinas, and dwelling in the safety that 
the pleadings and prayers of uncounted cen- 
turies have brought her to, who cannot stand 
the nervous strain of listening now and then to 
pleas for having the same blessings enlarged 
and passed on to other women and other lands ? 
Is not the martyrdom of giving ear to a pos- 
sible new truth a very small price to pay for the 
martyrdoms in which millions at the rack and 
the stake and on the battle-field have given their 



412 SERMONS 

whole lives to secure to the hearer his now pre- 
cious old truths? 

But supposing such themes do empty the 
church somewhat for the passing hour, they are 
the only ones that can fill the church for the 
coming years. True of it in all their force are 
the words of Jesus, " Whosoever will save his 
life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life 
for my sake shall find it." Why are its doors 
so largely deserted now by the common people, 
a desertion that is complained of in all denomi- 
nations far and wide.? Is it not in part be- 
cause the common people have lost their in- 
terest in the old problems of theology and in 
the concerns of another world, and have got 
the feeling that preachers are too timid to 
touch the great living problems of our own time 
and the concerns of this present earth.? A 
while ago a gentleman, inquiring among the 
workingmen of our country why they did not 
attend religious services, and told by one of 
them it was because they did not like the sub- 
jects the ministers were preaching about, asked 
him what he would have them preach about? 
" About anything but heaven," was the reply ; 
and undoubtedly he represented very largely 
the feeling of his class. There is no lack of in- 
terest in the earthly side of religion. Labor- 
halls are not deserted; political and reforma- 
tory meetings not thinly attended. And if the 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 413 

church is ever again to share humanity's num- 
bers, it must get for itself the reputation of 
sharing humanity's work. 

Does this mean that the church should give 
up the theistic and devotional side of religion 
to proclaim only its humanitarian side? Ear 
from it. It means only that it should connect 
the two more closely together. It was not be- 
cause the workingman disliked heaven that he 
did not want it preached about, but only because 
he had heard of it so much as a place wholly 
separate from earth. The work of the church 
should be like that of the great snow-moun- 
tains, so many of which I used to see on the 
western shore of our country, — Hood, Adams, 
Baker, St. Helen's, and Rainier. They rise up 
as pillars from earth into heaven. Through 
all the long winter months the clouds from far 
and wide bring to their royal brows the glitter- 
ing diadems and the heaped-up treasures of the 
ice and snow. They catch the earliest beams 
of the morning, and around them linger and 
play, in rose and crimson and purple tints, the 
latest hues of eve, while all night long they 
hold communion with the shining stars and the 
immeasurable heights of spotless sky; and as 
the traveler comes into their presence, he can 
but bow down before them in profoundest awe 
as before the very altars, which indeed they are, 
of the Infinite God. 



414 SERMONS 

But this is only one part of their work. Out 
of their glittering peaks and their piled-up 
treasures of the ice and snow, out of the very 
things which so excite our awe and adoration, 
they send down through all the long summer 
months a thousand little rills, which flow 
through the meadows, make the grass green 
and the flowers fair, quench the thirst of 
beasts and cattle, turn the wheels of mills and 
factories, and at last, uniting together, form 
a mighty river, the Columbia, which bears on 
its bosom the commerce of a great city. And 
one part of this work they do just as faithfully 
and just as much in the spirit of its being their 
mission as they do the other. 

So with the Christian church. It should in- 
deed have its mounts of devotion, have its times 
when it towers up from earth and holds com- 
munion with God and the spirit-world and the 
everlasting mysteries. No religion is ever 
worth much for practical life which has never 
knovrn what it is to lose itself in the ecstasy 
and mystery and inspiration of the spirit's 
realm. No soul is the one to come down and 
do the truest work for our common humani- 
tarian world — even for its idiot boys, as 
Raphael has shown so well in his wonderful pic- 
ture — that has not been transfigured and 
glorified and had its garments made shining 
white on the mountain-peaks of devotion. It 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 415 

should catch the first beams of each new truth 
from the great Sun of Righteousness that 
dawns over the earth, and be the brow around 
which linger and play all that is sweet and beau- 
tiful in the memories and associations of the 
older faiths. Yet all this is only a part of its 
work. Out of its hours of ecstasy and devo- 
tion, out of its new truths and its ancient 
memories, out of the very heights which excite 
most our awe and adoration, and where it holds 
communion closest with God and the spirit- 
world, it should send down its little rills of love 
and life into our common, every-day, human 
world, brightening up its homes, washing away 
the stains from its business, purifying its 
politics, lending its aid to the weary round of 
its shops and factories, filling the hearts of its 
adherents with kindness so that the very cattle 
they come in contact with from day to day will 
feel somehow in their dumb breasts that they 
have a Christian for a master, and bearing on 
its bosom of love the whole world's commerce 
nearer the eternal climes. Let the church do 
this work with the theistic and devotional side 
of its religion, use heaven to bless earth, and 
there need be no fear but that the workingman 
will want such a heaven preached to him, and 
that humanity everywhere will turn with fresh 
love to an institution from whose heights above 
there flow such streams into all its plains below. 



416 SERMONS 

Friends, it is this humanitarian side of re- 
ligion that in the four years of my pastorate 
with you, and in all my ministry, I have tried 
to set forth, — in behalf of this, as well as for 
its own eternal worth, that I have tried to 
utilize its theistic and devotional side. I am 
sorry that all of you could not go with me, 
heart, hand, and hearing, in the work ; glad that 
so many of you could do so, glad especially of 
those who, not able to go with me in their con- 
victions, have given me not less cordially their 
presence and support. 

If human errors and imperfections have 
mingled somewhat with my preaching other hu- 
manness ; if at any time my words or spirit have 
seemed to you unduly harsh or needlessly 
wounding, all such I ask you to forgive and 
forget. One thing I can claim alike here and 
in all my ministry, that when the question of 
what to say has come up before me, I have never 
asked how it was going to affect my pocket or 
popularity or personal welfare in any way, but 
only whether it was the truth and a needed 
truth, and, this answered, have gone ahead and 
proclaimed it with all the clearness and force 
and love of which I was capable, believing with 
Tennyson, 

*' Because right is right,, to follow right 
Were wisdom^ in the scorn of consequence/' — 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 417 

at any rate, of consequence to one's self. And 
if ever it has been " one-sided preaching," the 
one side has always been the side of liberty, of 
progress, of the weak and oppressed, never the 
side of tyranny, of reaction, and of the strong 
oppressor; for I never yet have seen that 
wrong was in any danger of suffering wrong 
from lack of pleaders, even without religion's 
voice; and however confusedly the two may 
sometimes get mixed with each other, and what- 
ever the party lines across which they may zig- 
zag back and forth, I have always held with 
Browning that, everywhere, 

" The right must be the right. 
And other than the wrong, while Heaven endures." 

Apart from its wider outlook, it is a pastor- 
ate, I am sure, which has not been wholly 
without those nearer human relations whose re- 
ligious worth we all alike can recognize. Chil- 
dren in the Sunday-school and at the baptismal- 
font have been a part of humanity that we have 
unitedly served. We have known the jollity 
of happy social gatherings. Sorrow has come 
to our houses, and in the seats before me, where 
once sat the living forms of those we loved, there 
now sit their silent memories, forevermore our 
mutual friends. Sacred to me personally will 
its four years always be as the time when the 
one who in all my other pastorates has been 



418 SERMONS 

my right-hand co-worker and adviser, and who 
held equally in her large soul all parts of reli- 
gion, has dropped from my side. Never shall 
I forget the warm human sympathy, the min- 
istry of comfort, that you all alike in those 
trying hours ministered back to me. I lay 
down my pastoral office with you to-day, but 
not my friendship and interest in your welfare, 
nor my purpose to help you in every desired 
way. I have learned while here to love your 
church, love the town, love the many noble in- 
dividual specimens of humanity I have found 
in all the churches and all through the place ; 
and my hope is that soon some other, perhaps 
younger, voice will be secured around which 
you of my own flock can all rally, and who, as 
cordially treated by the other pastors here as 
I have been, will lead you on yet further and 
better into being a useful, happy, and united 
church. 

Turning now for a last loving look at the 
ideal my service with you has had in view, let 
me say in farewell that whatever you may have 
thought of the efforts for its realization while 
they were being carried on, I have no fears but 
that in the future the thing itself is what you 
will be proud more and more to have had labored 
for within your walls. There is a legend that 
when one of the great cathedrals of Europe 
was being built, an old man came along and 



THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 419 

begged that he might be allowed to do some 
of its work. The architect respected the appli- 
cant's pious desire, but, fearing that his fail- 
ing eyes and trembling hands might only mar 
what he regarded as the building's more impor- 
tant parts, — its sacred altar, stately columns, 
illumined windows, angel forms, and statue of 
the son of God, — gave him only the face of a 
man to carve high up among the shadows of 
the roof, where its imperfections, if any, would 
never be seen. The old man did lovingly what 
was thought to be his humble part; then, 
forced to lay down his tools as no longer needed, 
passed away, and for years the whole thing 
was forgotten. But one day, when the as- 
cending sun was in the requisite position, a 
beam of light glancing through an illumined 
window, partly open, fell on the old man's work, 
revealing it as a thing of marvelous beauty. 
And thenceforward, as long as the cathedral 
stood, year after year on the day when the sun 
got round to lighting it up, crowds of people 
gathered within its doors to gaze thrilled and 
inspired, not on sacred altar and stately col- 
umn and illumined window and figures of ser- 
aph and Saviour, but, as the divinest thing 
there, on the sweet human face carved by the 
loving hands of this nameless old man. 

It is such an image, in that cathedral of God 
the nave and transept and majestic columns 



420 SERMONS 

and sacred altar of which are the whole wide 
earth, whose features I have tried to carve — 
not alone, but as the humble member of a guild 
reaching through all churches and all sects; 
and, obscure and insignificant as the work may 
now seem, and soon as I, as one of its work- 
men, am to pass away and be forgotten, I have 
faith that in the coming years, when the sun- 
light of God shall have mounted higher up in 
the sky, its radiance will reveal its true charac- 
ter, and you will find that the divinest work 
done in this temple is humanitarian work, and 
its divinest product a redeemed and perfected 
man. 



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